First off, for those of you reading via RSS, I apologize for the weird things that are happening with my feed these last few days. HELLO, PEOPLE READING AT BITACLE.ORG! SAY HELLO TO THE NICE BITACLE PEOPLE AND BE SURE TO THANK THEM FOR STEALING MY CONTENT LIKE THE BOTTOM-FEEDERS THEY ARE! THEN GO VISIT STOPBITACLE.ORG! SMOOCHES!
So, yeah. I am still trying to figure out what to do about this. I had changed to full feed so that I could have a copyright notice appended to my posts, but then I thought “Why am I giving these asshats my entire posts when I could, at the least, limit them to just the first few sentences?” I’m back to summary feeds, at least for now.
Anyway. So there’s that.
In the meantime, the housekeeping of the non-blog variety continues apace. Remember my elation at cleaning out my closet? It was so exciting, I continued on to cleaning up piles of junk in the kitchen, if you recall. (Of course you recall. You have nothing better to do than to keep track of my cleaning habits. That’s not creepy in the slightest.) The excitement of getting rid of stuff was intoxicating, and I couldn’t wait to have the entire house tidied up.
Well, I’m thinking I should maybe aim a bit more realistically in the future. Like, maybe I could set my sights on a Pulitzer, rather than on getting the entire house clean.
I dunno, maybe it would be doable if I lived alone. This is not to say that I never make a mess, just that I—unlike some people who live here—am capable of some basic maintenance when it comes to keeping clean areas clean. I do not, for example, leave a trail of papers and crayons behind me that spans three rooms. I hardly ever pull twenty books off the shelf to read at once and then leave them in a pile on the floor when something shiny distracts me. It’s very rare that I will have a snack, leaving crumbs all over the table and floor and a mysterious puddle near a pile of napkins. (“Well I wiped up the part that was touching me” is a good excuse to use in that situation, though.)
No matter what atrocities they leave behind them, I cannot blame all of the squalor on the children. They make it more challenging, to be sure. But today I noticed a huge contribution on my part.
Today was the day I decided I was going to dig out the mudroom. The mudroom is a very useful room to have, particularly in a climate like this; it gives you a place to enter the house and shuck your snowy (or muddy) clothing before continuing on into the living area of the house. My mudroom is actually part of an addition we put on the house shortly after buying it, which means that I got to design the space. And it’s everything I could want in a mudroom. I have the laundry in there (tucked away in a closet). I have a coat closet. I have a nice bench with storage inside and space for shoes underneath. The kids have cubbies and pegs for hanging their coats. It’s perfect.
It’s also Ground Zero of crap repository. Anything that gets carried into the house gets dropped in the mudroom. As a result, it’s been several years since the floor in there has seen the light of day, save for the two narrow corridors from the doors (the front door, and the garage door) to the doorway into the kitchen. No one has been able to sit on the bench for nearly as long; it’s covered in junk. And the large pile of stuff outside the coat closet is there, I think, because the closet itself is full. Of crap.
So I spent a couple of hours digging it all out. The mudroom is now clean and pristine; the bench is cleared off; the closet is emptied and organized; trash has been removed and too-small items bagged up for donation. All good, right?
Well, there’s just one little problem.
In cleaning out the mudroom, I gathered up a big pile of books and left them on the floor in the family room. I found various cups and bowls and boxes of snack items which I left in a pile on the kitchen counter. All three of us now have piles of shoes in our rooms to be put away (because I’m pretty sure we don’t need to keep every shoe in the house under the bench, despite our best efforts). Both kids have sweatshirts I found in there now sitting on the ends of their beds to be folded and put away. One big bag of stuff went down to the basement storeroom to be dealt with later. And I have a new stack of papers on my desk, rescued from the morass formerly on the bench.
In other words, the mudroom is spotless, but now every other room in my house is a mess again.
Next thing you know, I’ll just give up and clean out my car. Which likely means carrying a load of stuff into… the mudroom.
My life is so difficult.
:( About the full feed/partial feed thing, but I totally understand. You are the only person I will click through for. Just so you know.
DEATH to bitacle.org! They are not even deserving of a capital letter.
My mess always goes back and forth from the car and my room. It’s constant. My car was so clean, and then I had a concert tonight and just so much STUFF to get organized, and a change of clothes…and, aiee. Just such a mess.
New bed, cleaning the house – sounds like you’re nesting. hmmmm……
It must be that time of year… I cleaned my mudroom out this weekend and sadly took all the sandals and summer shoes out of the closet in preparation for SNOW BOOTS. Gah.
There is no point in cleaning the house as long as you have a) kids, or 2) dogs. It’ll just dirty itself again to frustrate you.
I totally understand what you mean. That is exactly what happens to me. I’m always trying to figure out why some people can keep their houses clean and I simply cannot. I’ve decided it’s genetic encoding. Guess it’s too late for my kids then…
This year for the first time my daughter did the huge “get rid of summer coats/shoes, put out winter coats/boots” front closet change. All by herself. I do have several piles around the house that were generated by the switch, but she did it alone. ALONE I say.
There is hope for the future.
Would it be possible for you to just include a copyright notice at the beginning of each article so that it would be included in partial feeds?
One of my pasttimes is moving stuff from one closet in my house to another room, to another closet, back to the original closet, then to….you get the drift. And yet I never manage to actually get “rid” of anything. But it makes me *feel* like I’m cleaning. LOL
Maybe when the kids grow up…
Sorry about bitacle. They stole my stuff too.
I can appreciate your dilema with cleaning. I cleaned out my coat closet last year. I got it organized and looking fabulous. Then I turned around and was faced with the mountains of crap that I had just excavated. Goodwill had a good day.
Okay I have to ask. If copyright is automatic (physical posting is not required for copyright to be legal) Why do you think posting your copyright would mean or make any difference to bitacle? Why don’t you just past a stop bitacle button (for a few weeks) at the beginning of each post.
Um am I the only noob ass who doesn’t know what the heck Mir is talking about? bitacle Button stealing, she’s sure pretty, smart and funny, and all, but why would someone wanna steal her?
I went to both websites and am still not sure either. How did you find out they were stealing your content Mir? The part about why would anyone want to steal her content is obvious though, she’s fabulous, who wouldn’t want some of that on their site.
I just heard about the Bitacle thing today. They only have a few of my posts. Sad when I suck so bad they won’t even steal my whole blog.
Snow boots? You mean they make special shoes for that?
Yeah, it didn’t seem to matter that I only had summary feeds – they had taken the whole page anyway. And here I’ve been thinking all this time, “wow- somebody in Spain likes me? How cool!”
Except, no. Not cool at all.
http://annenahm.com/?p=196
I heard about this bitacle thing and it’s just sickening. Ugh. I sure hope that these people can be stopped!
I hear ya on the housekeeping. I am constantly shuffling piles of crap from the end tables to the dining table to the sideboard and back. I would give just about anything to have “Clean Sweep” come to my house.
I know everyone will think I am wierd, but I actually love to do those massive, everytyhing-in-its-place cleanings (when I have the time). It must be my OCD or something. I can’t STAND for my house to be cluttered. (Not that there aren’t areas that are a mess).
I have found that I start in one room on one side of the house and work my way to the other side. So by the time I get to the last room, all the others have been done. Of course it is way more diffucult now that the kids are mobile.
This is why I am instilling my OCD on my childen. My daugher’s favorite game is clean up and she refuses to sleep if her toys aren’t put away. Is this a bad thing?
I like Ben’s take on it: “There is no point in cleaning the house as long as you have a) kids, or 2) dogs. It’ll just dirty itself again to frustrate you.”
My fella and I share 1500 sq. ft. with three large dogs, four cats, and a snake. Periodically, someone will come over and look around incredulously and say “Don’t you ever vacuum?!” to which I wearily reply “I try, but I am outnumbered and out-fuzzed.” ‘cos seriously? I can vacuum, then go back over the same area on my way back to put the vacuum up, and I am confronted with tumblefur as soon as I close the closet.
I haven’t figured out how to write anything about Bitacle except for back-the-fuck-off because my head threatens to explode everytime that I do.
Interesting coincidence, though… laundry provokes the EXACT same reaction from me.
Totally utterly confused by the whole bitch-acle debacle.
Your mudroom, my front porch, same problem…