I Heart Productive Days

Bill and I had a really productive day yesterday. I finally got a chance to get all those dust bunnies out from under the bed, along with pens, random pills of bill's allegry medicine, socks and bobby pins. The area under your bed can really be like the Bermuda Triangle. There's a corner in my kitchen I've named the Bermuda Triangle because its the dirtiest, grossest and tightest corner in the whole kitchen. Everytime I'm cooking or cutting vegetables or just hanging out in the general vicinity with any type of food, anything that falls onto the floor rolls into that corner like there's some sort of invisible force pulling it over there. On a very bad day you can find, remains of sour cream, julienned carrots, zuchinni cirles and kashi puffs. That's all gone now. Sounds gross but its not as bad as it sounds.

When I lived at home doing chores wasn't such a big deal. I'd just do it and it'd be done. There were some chores I didn't like but I'd do them anyway because my step-mom told me to. I think lots of Latino parents are either obsessively obsessed with cleanliness or obsessively obsessed with not knowing what the word means. My parents fall in the former category. I hated cleaning walls that everyone else dirtied by dragging their hands across when they walked by. Its strange. Just like the footprint I found in the refridgertor last weekend. Cleaning was so easy at home because it was a group effort. Everyone put in their 2 cents and thing got done. Here, sharing the place with three other people things stay clean for about half a day. The dishwasher is always full of clean or dirty dishes and the sink many times gets full of dirty dishes when the dishwasher is full of clean dishes. There are always dust bunnies under my bed, there is always toothpaste in the bathroom sink, the fuzzy mat on the floor in front of the toilet is always dusty and the dirty clothes bin always has dirty clothes in it.

Why is cleaning so difficult now that I'm away from home? I can't even manage to put my clothes away after wearing them. At home not one day went by where everything wasn't in its place. Every saturday I would clean my room and my bathroom. Everything was always spotless. Sundays I would clean the other side of our house, the side only "visitors" were allowed to go into. It was the side with the really good furniture and really big TV. Our houses get considerably bigger each time we move. The place my parents live in in Colombia is a palace. I'm not lying. It has 3 floors a view of the whole city. I got lost the first time I went home. I don't do chores there anymore. They have 2 house keepers, so I only make my bed and make sure my dishes get put in the sink.