I am extraordinarily tired right now, but it is the exhaustion of virtue. Someone donated a small bookcase to our house, and I snatched it up immediately. Initially I stored the bookcase in the center of my room, but today I did massive rearranging to put it in the perfect spot, and it is now filled with good measure of books, packed down, shaken together, overflowing. (These books had previously been in boxes and piles on every horizontal surface, and were hard at work finding a way to take up space without a base). I dusted everything (including the baseboards but not the ceiling fan), vacuumed every bit of floor about three times over, and moved every single piece of furniture. In the process I found a broken outlet plate behind a bureau which left a hole large enough for a whole parade of mice, which explains the Christmas biscotti that had already been eaten by the time I turned up hopefully holding a cup of coffee. I also found a live spider and beetle (the beetle is a stupid, cow-like kind that tends to fall off walls) which I escorted outside, and a number of dead beetles (same kind) which I interred in the Oreck. I am now doing my laundry, which had spilled out of the closet and engulfed my chair. The chair (and its ottoman), a partially-broken CD player, and a donated floor lamp complete my free and fabulous abode. I feel about as happy as a cat in a basket that was originally intended for someone else.
On Saturday a really wonderful family (with five adorable children) came to visit, and when I took the wife around the house I carefully avoided my room, explaining suavely that it was a disaster. But I forgot to warn my boss, and when she took the husband around, a couple of the small children ran into my room exposing it in all of its glory. I comforted her by saying that it wasn't as bad as it could have been (the bed was more or less made and there were no visible undergarments), but she didn't seem consoled. Somehow she doesn't seem to relish my letting my room become a disaster so that I can have the pleasure of effecting a major change in one afternoon of cleaning.
