Cleaning, Clorox, and Contact

The circle of domesticated life: in the process of cleaning one room, another room will inevitably become dirty which leads to the cleaning of that room and the sacrifice of cleanliness in yet another room.  In the end, when all the rooms are clean, clothing will be a mess, dishes will need to be done and in the aftermath of all of this, relaxation will be had.  Relaxation means taking the nicely folded blankets from the couch for cuddling up, dragging out all the movies from their nicely organized cubby, leaving little plates and cups near the seating and thereby creating a dirty room.  Meanwhile the cats watch you with an air of 'good job, human, keep up the good work, human, by the way, slave, I'm hungry and my litter box needs cleaned and if you don't attend to my needs right this moment I will take a revenge crap on your dinning room floor and flavor with the air with a scent that can only be described as pure evil.'  That is the circle of domesticated life.  Now throw in grocery shopping and work and you have the American Dream. 

We've been cleaning the house in preparation for Easter.  So far so good and yet, as previously stated, the cycle never really ends.  Agitation has set in.  For me, I am kicking myself in the ass for not being more on the ball with homework, and for the rest of us, the lack of a working mop has taken its toll.  Still, little by little the house is becoming presentable.  The back porch is clean thanks to Hannah, but the upstairs neighbors have taken to peppering out patio with tupperware, discarded cigarettes, wrappers and other various trash.  Spring is here and if this keeps up, there will be words.  I intend to do a good deal of my writing sitting on the back patio now that it's warmer - I have found in the past that I work better outside - and I don't want to feel like I'm in a frat boy's den whilst I do it.  

This just in: Galen decided it would be a good idea to lap up the Clorox from the bottom of the shower.  Now we have calls in to the vet and have put him in a different bathroom all alone with a dish of wet food to hopefully dilute the amount he took in.  I think he'll be alright, he's far too ornery to be out of commission for long.  Still, it caused quite a stir in our cycle of clean, rest, sip coffee, clean, clean, rest, clean, more coffee.  We're kind of curious to see if he gets some gray spots after this ordeal - he's a completely black cat aside form a few stray white hairs, with great potential for bleaching. 

Aside from all of that, the only other thing I have going on right now is a full out war with technology.  It's sad when a teeny little MP3 player thwarts me.  Even my poor Acer, which I have dropped on its head time and time again, does what I need it to do with little to no complaint.  But this damn MP3 player... I'm loading it with music for my aunt but I'm ripping all the tunes from her collection of CDs and apparently this is too much for the combined efforts of the computer and the 2GB music device.  But the war goes further than that - the cash register at work likes to yell at me and push my into transactions when I haven't even scanned anything.  The cars had jumped on this bandwagon as well.  My Kia needs a new clutch and Hannah's jeep is having transmission fluids blues.  The only thing that works for me is the cell phone and I'm officially late in paying the bill.  It occurs to me that this blog has turned into gratuitous whining so let's finish it up with something a bit more exciting.

I was recently contacted by a person who reads this blog.  She asked me a variety of questions about Pine Manor College and why I chose this program versus the one offered by Queens.  After a pleasant back and forth wherein we discussed her concerns about the size of the community she informed me that her son is going for his MFA and that the information supplied on my blogs and in our correspondence helped him decide on Pine Manor.  It makes me very happy that not only did this individual feel comfortable enough to contact me, but that I could represent the program in such a positive way.  I look forward to meeting her son during the next residency.  Another little feather in my cap is that Meg Kearney, our MFA director, asked me if she could quote a portion of my student eval (the part about cover letters) in the next student handbook.  With chest all swelling with pride, I said of course.