the underwear drawer

house beautiful

First item of news is that I got a new wallet.




Joe had it waiting on my desk when I came home post-call! A Paul Frank knockoff, but cute nonetheless. Now if only I had some money to put inside.

Though so far vacation has consisted mainly of sleeping, eating, and playing Scrabble, I've been enjoying myself immensely. It'll start to get boring soon, I'm sure, but I have enough errands to keep me occupied for the time being: haircut, DMV, dog, Scutmonkey, cleaning, shopping, party preparation.

Speaking of cleaning, can I tell you how much I hate to do it? Well, I do. There, I said it. I hate cleaning. There, I said it again. I especially hate cleaning this year. There's very little else I would like to do with my hard-earned spare time than scrub the toilet. That's just the way it is, friends. But then of course if I don't do it, Joe ends up doing it during his time off (cleanest man alive, remember), and then I feel bad both that he's spending his hard-earned spare time cleaning the toilet, and that I'm not domestic.

The solution, I decided, is if we spring for a house-cleaner. Not someone who comes by all that often, as we do practice a modicum of good habits in our day-to-day lives (cleaning up spills, picking up after ourselves), but just someone to do the big jobs: floors, bathrooms, kitchen. Maybe once every two or three weeks. No big thing, right? And lots of other residents do it. I even got a very good recommendation from a co-resident in my class, who loves her house-cleaner and would follow her to the ends of the earth. There, easy, right?

The only problem is this. I have this guilt about hiring someone to clean my house. I would have this sneaking feeling that I'm some classist bourgeoise overlord--like, damn bitch, why can't you just clean your own house? Plus, how many people are we going to pay to do stuff for us? We already take our laundry to a service (they have this amazing way of folding all your clothes the exact same size, stacking them into this perfect cube of clean laundry) and hire some lady to walk our dog for us when we're at work. What, we need a whole team to help us with our lives now? What's next, a butler?

On a new subject, getting so much sleep the past few days must have tapped into my dormant REM reserves, because I've been having some very vivid dreams of late. Like last night, I dreamed that the dog was out on the balcony, pushing the flower pots over the edge, and somehow managed to wedge herself between the two railings. (To the person who was so thoughtful as to worry about Cooper's safety on the balcony, this would never happen in real life--she's way too huge, and we strung wire through the gap as a safety measure when she was a puppy. And in terms of the height of the railing, it comes up to mid-chest on me, and we never let her out unsupervised. But obviously, we worry about her too, hence the dream.) Anyway, in the dream, I was inside, and saw her slithering between the gap in the railings, kind of in slow motion, and then fall over the edge. I was yelling to Joe, "Stop her! Get the dog!" but he couldn't hear me because the door was closed. We didn't see the splattered dog bits or anything, but come on, we live on the 19th floor, so of course she died, and it was very sad.

But you know the worst part? The end of the dream was us getting in the car to go to the pound to get a new dog. Like, right that same day. I am a cruel and heartless person.

Currently reading: "Ghost World" by Daniel Clowes. Great dialogue. I enjoyed this book a lot more than "David Boring" or "A Velvet Glove Cast in Iron" because I could actually follow the plot.

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