Did anything good happen today? May 2018

I hope this is ok with everyone.

I thought we could share our successes no matter how small.

Any takers?

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Parents
  • Today was really productive. I managed to finally send an e-mail to get my favourite watch repaired. I was dreading sending it, I don't know why because it is still inside warranty. I washed all my summer jackets, beeswaxed my shoes, and mixed down a song. I also laughed at something until I couldn't breath. That hasn't happened in a while.

    I also managed not to vacuum the house and dust. That was a big thing. ******* OCD runs my life at times.

  • I did vacuum and clean on Wednesday - midweek normally I have no time - and will again today. I really need to because of my stupid allergies. 

  • I'll vacuum and clean until the urge goes away it's quite depressing sometimes. Even when I was working 6 days a week and drinking heavily I'd still vacuum and clean obsessively, even if I was hardly sleeping. ******* OCD, lol. I'm beginning to have the odd day where I can fight the urge though! 

  • Try running it on the hottest cycle a few times. Sometimes the drum can be called the centrifuge. That's where stuff can collect. Baking soda and vinegar are magical. They are better than any stain remover ever!

  • Eeew! My washing machine has sometimes produced stinky clothes too but finding g a plumber can be very difficult. Someone showed me sludge in my pipes once but when the plumber came he wouldn't listen and insisted my centrifuge capacity was at fault. 

    Someone suggested I try bakings oda with vinegar and that certainly helps. 

  • Good descriptive story writing Tom! The first few paragraphs are kind of unintentional psychological horror to me though, lol.Grin

    Fat and skin inside washing machines is another thing that most people don't know the extent of! Over the warm period a few weeks ago my friend came over and said "My washing machine stinks, it rattles like a dustbin". I said "Have you boil washed it lately?". He looked at me puzzled "No why? I haven't ever done it". I told him that there is a ball of fat and other people stuff in the drum. You have to boil it out every so often. He was disgusted. "Well that's the one thing my mom didn't drone on about before I moved out!". I couldn't help but laugh at that!

    I never lose anything that's one plus to it all I guess! BTW thanks for reminding me to vacuum the matresses!

    Have you had any stuff published?

  • I would share some if I could, if you really wanted it! You would be doing me a favour!

  • It doesn't matter what's going on in my life, and whatever the demands are on my time, I have to clean and vacuum the flat every Friday evening when I get home from work.  It honestly doesn't look any different when I finish - but I notice that difference in the accumulation of dust in the cleaner canister.  If something happens that makes me late home from work on a Friday, it makes me hugely anxious.

    Here's an excerpt from a piece of fiction I wrote a few years back - but it's pretty much about me and the way I am...

    *

                Friday is my housework day, so when I got back from the gym I got my vacuum cleaner out.  I emptied the dust canister first - but although I only have a small flat, and there's only me in it, by the time I'd finished it was almost a third full again.  Enough to fill a coffee mug.  Mostly it was fluff - like a grey wodge of the most boring candy floss in the world.  But there was a lot of grittier stuff, too - curving up the side of the canister in layers of varying shades, like one of those seaside ornaments full of different coloured sands.  The instruction manual that came with the cleaner says that nearly 1,000 dust particles per square centimetre settle on domestic surfaces every hour.  So maybe it shouldn't surprise me. 

                Where does it all come from, though?

                What is this quintessence of dust? as the good prince asked.

                According to a science website I looked at, it's estimated that humans shed the entire outer layer of skin every day or two, at a rate of about 7 million flakes per minute.  7 million flakes weighs about 20 milligrams.  Multiply that by the minutes in a day and you have roughly 28 grams of skin a day.  That's about 2 pounds a month - which explains why my vacuum canister fills up so quickly.  I don't shed it all here, of course.  A fair bit of it will be at the gym.  Some will be in the shops I go to.  Some will be in the group room at the alcohol centre, and some in AA meeting rooms.  There'll be a flurry at the library where I do my voluntary work.  Another at my mother's.  An occasional scattering - just a few flakes, not settling - at Karen's.  Most of it will be here, though.  Right here in these four small rooms.  My dust settles around me, in drifts.  I see it blizzarding in the light through my windows and from the lamps.  I will end up as dust, and am turning to dust as I go.

                I stripped the bed and put the things on to wash.  I vacuumed the mattress, as I do every week.  It may have been my imagination, but the level in the canister seemed to be very much higher after that.  I put the vacuum away, took the rubbish sacks down, then tidied up.  It always astonishes me how out of order everything gets during the week, without my even noticing it.  It's only when I come to clean up that I realise.  Little islands of things everywhere.  My laptop, plus its separate keyboard and mouse, on a board in the middle of the living room floor, where I left it after I last used it on Tuesday.  A pile of books beside - not on - the coffee table.  Trainers and boots strewn across the hallway, like roadkill.  My camcorder, on its mini tripod, on the cistern in the loo.  What did I take it in there for?  I have no idea.  I don't even remember putting it there.

                I find this happening more and more.  Absent-mindedness runs in the family, on my mother's side via her father, and I know it's coming out in me (just as the other stuff comes down my father's side).  I have two pairs of glasses - one for reading, one for distance work.  I keep telling myself to put them in one place when I take them off, so I know where they are.  But I keep losing them.  I'll search the flat high and low (which doesn't take long in these small rooms), but still not be able to find them.  Then they'll turn up somewhere unexpected: under the piano, or on a food shelf, or beside the loo.  I try to figure out the sequence of events that have led up to my leaving them in such places, but I rarely can.  One day, after searching for 20 minutes or so, I was despairing and starting to panic.  Then I remembered something I read in a Poe story years ago: that the best place to hide something is the most obvious place to look for it - like hiding money in a safe.  I looked in my glasses case, and there they were (Q.E.D.) - glaring out at me, blank-eyed and haughty at my stupidity (Q.E.D. that, too).  Keys are the same.  I have a key rack in the kitchen.  My keys go on it every time I come in and am finished with them.  They're never there when I want to go out again, though.  Perhaps my brain, not my skin, is turning to dust.  Perhaps that's what a lot of the grey matter is in my vacuum canister.  Brain dust.

  • I must need some OCD then. I probably do need to vacuum that often. 

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