Hola everyone!
I'm back!
Things at Casa Mouse have been... interesting, to say the least. I was chugging along, dealing with the SAD that came along with this winter like a giant anvil. I kind of crawled under a rock and waited for the sun to come back.
Then on March 18th my basement flooded. The sump pump malfunctioned, and the next thing I knew water was coming up through the floor, and the parquet was buckling like the Appalachian mountain range.
The good news was that, since I was maintaining my place at about a Level 1, there was nothing on the basement floor. One of the bookcases got a little wet, and one cardboard box got ruined, but everything else was clear. Everything in the cardboard box was in fact yarn wrapped in plastic bags, so there was no harm done.
That's where the good news ends.
Because of the danger of mould and what have you, I had to move my bedroom out of the basement (that's where I usually sleep), as well as all of the furniture in the other room. My landlord came and helped me move all the furniture, which got piled a bit randomly all over the upstairs and a bit in the outside shed.
So since then I've been living in what feels like a really well-stocked refugee camp. I've been sleeping on the upstairs sofa, which has done nothing good for me. My neck kind of hurts almost constantly these days.
Anyway, the repairs took FOREVER, and are still ongoing. My floor just got finished last Thursday, and the walls (they had to rip out two feet of drywall along the whole basement) are only half-done. There's still plastering to be done, and then painting.
My landlords, while sweet, are NOT the most organized people, and this has dragged and dragged and dragged. In the meantime, I was living in what was basically a tunnel. I had no floor space, things were piled everywhere, and there was no room in which to work.
So everything piled up. Laundry, dishes, cat hair, you name it. I managed mostly to keep on top of the dishes, but not as well as I would have liked.
THEN I discovered that the cats, stressed out of their minds by the upheaval and the constant coming-and-going of workmen, had been using the basement as a litter box. I cleaned up after them every day as best I could (can't install flooring over cat poop), but the behaviour hasn't stopped since the floor was put in.
So just yesterday my landlord came and helped me move my furniture back to where it belongs. THANK GOD. Now I can see my floor again, and I am ready to weep. It's filthy, covered in cat hair, and there's laundry all over the place.
Still, by sheer dint of moving furniture, my apartment has miraculously gone from Level 4 squalor back down to somewhere between Level 1 and 2. I still have piles, but the floor is clear. I have a MOUNTAIN of laundry I couldn't get to before. I think that, given a few days, I could probably pull this place into decent shape again.
The problem? I'm leaving tomorrow morning at 6:00 for ten days for work. So now I have today in which to get it pulled together halfway so that the person coming to feed the cats won't be entirely horrified.
Argh.
Still, I'm pretty pleased at how quickly things are slipping back into place. I thought for sure I'd be in for weeks of cleaning and such. As it is, when I get back from my business trip I'm going to do a massive de-clutter of the place, do some much-needed filing, and maybe get this place down to a Level 0.
Anyway, that's the last three months in a nutshell. How's everyone else doing?
~Mouse
