Cleaning things. Cleaning everything.

Mop and pail bucket Sorry for another blog free day. Two things happened. As some of you noticed, my site went down. This was not a bad thing but a good one: I am on a new server so I should have fewer outages in the future.

The other thing that happened is that I have been helping my daughter move into her new apartment.  The apartment’s previous occupants were three boys, and I understand that, before that, there were a bunch of college boys living for several rental generations in this apartment.

The result was the dirtiest apartment I have ever seen. I have spent the last two days alternating between shopping for basic supplies and cleaning at a frenzied level. I am a bit of a germaohobe, but I think even non-germaphobes would’ve had a hard time with this place.

While my daughter worked on the kitchen, I spent almost 2 hours scrubbing the floor in a microscopic bathroom to get off layers of grime. For a little while there, I actually thought I had stripped the linoleum before realizing that I was just stripping layers of embedded dirt and grime. I thought it was a dark gray floor. It turned out to be a light yellow floor. Gross.

I also rented a steam cleaner for the carpet in her microscopically small bedroom. After 15 passes with the steam cleaner I finally gave up, exhausted. The water was no longer coming out black but was still a dubious shade of gray. We bought a cheap area rug at IKEA to cover part of the floor and my daughter promises never to sit on the remainder.

My daughter thought I was making sweeping generalizations when I said that guys are more slobbish than girls, but I think I am correct.  My theory is that, going back to hunter and gatherer days, if children were to survive, women had to be clean and organized. There must have been some natural selection going on there.

Anyway, that’s the news from here. I haven’t glanced at the Internet all day, which has been somewhat relaxing. I do know about the BuzzFeed and Mueller fiasco, but I am more interested in cleaning right now.  I suspect that, as Dan Bongino has said, this story was an effort to smoke out leakers. That, or it’s just the usual slime emanating from Washington DC.

Please feel free to treat this as an open thread. I will try to blog tomorrow, but I cannot make any promises. There is a whole lot of cleaning and shopping still to do before I fly home (with luck in 6 hours, not the 18 hours it took to get here). Right now, though, my daughter and her roommates are making another shopping run and they very nicely suggested I relax a little. Worked for me.