My Floors Are Cleaner Than Your Floors . . . or, How My Day Went Horribly Wrong

Starting tomorrow, I will be spending the bulk of the next few weeks in El Campo with my family in observance of the Christmas season. Exciting, I know.

“But Jennifer,” you may be asking. “What in the name of Satan does that have to do with your floors?”

I’ll gladly tell you.

Note that earlier I said I would only be spending part of the Christmas holiday in El Campo. This is because I’m a big girl now. I have my own apartment, with my own bills to pay, my own mailbox and everything. In college, I lived in the dorms two years, one year in a campus apartment with friends, and one year I commuted from home. During law school, I lived in an apartment over my cousin’s garage, God bless her. So for the very first time, I am really living on my own. I realized this meant that I couldn’t go home and stay there for three weeks straight – I need to come back and get my mail, drop off my rent, pick up my bills, etc. etc. You know, fun grown-up stuff.

This realization led quickly to another – If I had to make a short trip to Austin from El Campo, it was quite probable that I would have a carpool guest . . . my mom.

As a natural result of this consequence, I have spent today, my first day free from school, cleaning like a madwoman. I cleaned the whole apartment – and really cleaned it, like, with a mop and stuff. In preparation for my travels, I’ve had several loads of laundry going as well. Finally around 2:45 I decided to take a little break. Have a glass of tea, go through the long list of shows on my DVR. As I started to relax, I heard a thump in the laundry room. Naturally, I assumed the broom had fallen over, as it tends to do. Shortly thereafter, I went to the kitchen to refill my drink. A fragrant blue substance was slowly creeping out from under the laundry room floor and across my freshly mopped kitchen linoleum.

As my buzzard luck would have it, it was not in fact the broom that fell down in the laundry room. It was the brand-new bottle of laundry soap that had somehow fallen from the top of my stacked washer and dryer. And shattered its lid on the floor. First I panicked, and my instant reaction was to run for the phone and call my mom. I stopped myself. “No . . .” I said (out loud) . . . “she’ll laugh and judge!” I decided I could handle the gelatinous laundry room beast on my own.

I picked up the bottle, the shoes that were on the floor waiting to be laundered, and the broom and Swiffer and tossed them in the sink. The basket of dirty clothes waiting on the floor to be washed was whisked to the bathtub. I used towels to sop up the massive puddle of laundry soap, and tossed them into the sink as well. Now . . . what to do with the residue left behind. Being the clever, clever girl I am, I thought “I know! I’ll Swiffer mop it!”

If you guessed that this would turn my kitchen into a deadly oil slick, unfit for one as clumsy as I . . . well kudos to you, you’re smarter than the lawyer.

Cut to me, spending the next 15 minutes scooting around my kitchen floor on a wet bath towel.

I always have loved the smell of fresh laundry. Good thing, since my entire apartment reeks of it now.

Sarcasmo

PS: I know what you’re thinking. It was careless of me to put the laundry soap in a place where the dryer’s vibrations could knock it over. But I didn’t even leave it close to the edge of the dryer – I had been in there not 15 minutes before The Incident to check to see if my sheets were dry, and it was in its normal position behind the rim on top of the dryer. So not only did I have all that mess to deal with all afternoon, probably I have ghosts too.

Currently Excited About: this beer in my hand.