A Week of The Little Things

This must be because the increased upper body strength
makes for an easier time vacuuming under heavy things.
Right?
....RIGHT?

Have you ever spent a day--or perhaps a couple of days--digging into the deep cleaning chores of your house?  Maybe you wash both sides of the windows, vacuum behind the couches, dust the stuff above eye level...that sort of thing.  I mean you really tear into that motherfucker like you are a rabid wombat or something.  Every big cleaning task you can think of is done, and you look around hoping to have that victorious feeling that comes only from a totally clean house...or from standing on a two-story pile of zombie bodies with a shotgun in one hand, a chainsaw in the other (and maybe a hawtie or two of your preferred gender hanging off of your legs).  And you gaze around and look at your handiwork.

But fuck if the place doesn't still look like a total mess.

Fortunately for me, I now have extensive househusbandry experience, so I know exactly what is going on here.  You did the big stuff.  But most of what people look around and see isn't actually the big stuff.  It's the little things.  (And now that I've written that the Danny Elfman soundtrack to Wanted is going through my head, but given it's lyrical applicability to the phenomenon I'm describing, let's run with it.)

The good news is that the little things won't take you as long as the big things.  Breeze through a room gathering up shoes, dirty dishes, beer bottles, used needles, little tiny baggies, razor blades, hand mirrors, and anything that might link you back to the hooker buried in the back yard, and you're pretty much done.

This blog needs me to do a lot of little things. I've got a poll I will be putting up today.  I have a tab in the pages (up at the top) that has needed some attention for months.  I need to add the subject of Friday's mailbox (writing every day) to the F.A.Q.  I've got some creative writing that I've been meaning to polish and post.  I'm still not done tagging the old entries.  I'll get some posts up every day--including some meaty stuff--so I'm not bailing on substance, but I want to toss the schedule this week (the updating schedule being, ironically, one of the things I need to update).  

It's a good week for it.  I'm in semester's end crunch at work over at Diablo Valley College.  The students are getting a little freaked out about finals and this is usually the time in a semester where I don't know exactly when I'm going to need to spend an extra chunk of time talking one of them down from a bell tower.  The end of the semester is always when strictly scheduled stuff gets really hard to keep up with, so giving the finger to the schedule for a week or so will keep me from ending up in a rubber room gently petting my half used roll of paper towels and telling everyone who looks at me to stop trying to fry my only remaining synapse.