Thursday, December 14, 2006

Cleaning Day

I woke up at 6:00am and started cleaning. It's been a while since I last cleaned the apartment and as it so happens a lot of stuff has accumulated since. Junk mail and bills alone started piling up and adding to piles of clutter. Then there's the camera boxes and photo gear along with the books on photography.

Newspapers and magazines I dragged back from London, pamphlets on clubs from Montreal, newspapers that I started reading on some bus trip, bus schedules, various photo magazines, stuff, junk and more junk. If I didn't know any better I would have thought that the stuff just multiplies by itself.

The fire put under my ass was the thought of someone visiting the apartment one day. Yes, yes the girl. There I said it. Geez. No piece of dust was too small, no furniture too big. The cleaning included vacuuming, doing the laundry, throwing stuff out. Wow, did I throw stuff out.

The making the apartment look nice also involved going out to buy a new pillow. The old pillow I had had the stuffing fall out when I went to change pillow cases. As I don't ever remember buying any pillows in my life time this was a new venture.

The pillow I owned I had for years, to the extent that it was really flat. Two of them together were still flatter than one new one. This made the buying of a new one a bit difficult. I wanted the same flatness and ended up buying the softest pillow available.

For those that don't know pillows generally come in three versions. Soft, Medium, and Firm. When staying a a Holiday Inn in London there were five levels of pillow-dom. Here only three. It's difficult to see the difference when buying them as they're usually in a plastic bag. I spent about 20 minutes squeezing the various pillows. There was one made out of that space age memory foam but it was $80 compared to the average foam pillow costing $11. In the end I went for a average priced $23 pillow. It seemed super soft but when I got home it was too fat. D'oh.

I continued to clean the walls and bathroom and eventually stopped around 8pm. While I was doing all this I had my camera shoot a frame every minute to create a stop motion animation of the cleaning process. One day I'll put it to Benny Hill music.

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