Today is a ‘set this house in order’ day; I’m leaving early tomorrow morning for a four-day RWA writing retreat in Nashville (50th birthday present to myself), and I’m going to spend most of the day finishing up various little projects, answering e-mails, etc. Mostly cleaning, though.
Yesterday was something of a post-pandemic milestone — during the pandemic we kind of let the kids run wild on the third floor. I think I didn’t even go up there for several months. As a result, it became a truly feral place. It’s kind of amazing how filthy two children can make an entire floor when left to their own devices for long enough.
Honestly, I think we were all somewhat pandemic-depressed; the whole house really did kind of fall apart after a while, and the last few months have been a slow grind getting it back to decent shape. Having people over again for board games and Serendib meetings definitely is an incentive to keeping it to a base level of clean!
We’ve been working on clearing the kids’ floor (converted attic). Now that Kavi and her friends are vaccinated, and Anand is bubbling with one other unvaccinated friend, they’d like to be able to have people over on the third floor, and I told them it had to be clean first.
So yesterday, all four of us working together, we finally got both of their rooms actually clean for the first time in a year and a half. They’re quite excited about it.
Well, Kavi is excited; she likes her spaces much better when they’re clean, she just doesn’t want to clean them herself. Anand says he’s fine with some chaos. I’m okay with *some* chaos, but I’m not okay with food dropped on the floor and attracting vermin. We all have our limits. (We found many of the missing spoons yesterday. We have been unfairly blaming Anand for this — it turns out that Kavi is at least as much to blame. Sorry, Anand!)
It was nice, hanging out in Anand’s space room for a bit when the job was done yesterday. 
And it puts my mind a little more at ease, knowing there aren’t terrible things happening up on the third floor…
