Spent most of the afternoon and evening (well, save for an hour required by a meeting) doing the typical end-of-semester/pre-vacation cleaning of the house.

This is done for several reasons: first, I finally have time to do it RIGHT. Second, it is more tolerable returning after vacation (especially considering that returning from the upcoming vacation, I will almost immediately face preparations to have a crown put on a bad tooth) to come back to a clean house. Third, ants are less prone to enter when all the crumbs have been removed (and yeah, I'll have to do it again between now and Wednesday).

But it is also really nice to have a totally (well, almost) clean house.

(Almost because I didn't get to the Inner Sanctums - my bedroom and the sewing room. I tend to start with the "public" rooms, especially the kitchen (I am very uncomfortable with the thought of someone "just dropping by" and finding my kitchen an insanitary mess). I work through those, and leave the guest bedroom (unless I'm planning on a guest, which is vanishingly rare these days) and my room until last. Usually by then I've either run out of time or energy.)

I did to the guest bedroom this time because there was a really horrible stack of accumulated paper - unopened/undisposed of junk mail (mostly pleas for money from various charities) and old bill stubs.

I never know how long to keep the stubs of, say, my monthly cable bill. I know, they say you can toss them out but I'm kind of paranoid that my cable company will suddenly disavow all knowledge of me and I'll have to deal with a lot of red tape to prove I'm not stealing cable or something. So the stubs pile up and eventually I just bung them in a big rubbermaid box. I suppose I wouldn't be able to find a specific one if I needed it but not pitching them makes me feel better. (I do, eventually. I figure if three years or so have passed without a problem, I'm probably safe.)

I also washed the wood floors - something I do maybe every 4 months or so. It makes them look better, and I suppose it gets rid of some of the finer grime that could scratch the finish. (The finish I paid $3000 to have redone before I moved in here. Which is why I take my shoes off at the door.). I also figure it gets rid of some of the accumulated allergens like pollen and mites and stuff.

Most of my cleaning effort is actually not cleaning per se, it's sorting junk (mostly paper, mostly mail) and deciding what I can get rid of and what I need to keep and then where I can store those need-to-keep things.

If I had a shrink-ray it would be so much easier. I could pile up all the receipts and old tax forms and crap like that and shrink it all down and keep it in old matchboxes.

And if I had a shrink-and-restore-to-size ray, I could shrink my whole yarn and fabric stash and store it a lot more handily, and just zap what I needed back to size when I wanted it. And I could store the books I'm not reading right now so easily.

It's really too bad I can't envision any way that a shrink ray (or a shrink-then-embiggen-later ray) would actually WORK in the real world. I suppose you could wave your hands a bit and talk about decreasing the space between the atoms but I don't think that would work.

Of all the outlandish Jetsons type gadgets, I think a shrink-ray would be most useful. Forget the flying cars - with the way people drive now, I'd hate to see them being able to violate traffic laws in three dimensions. A shrink ray would also neatly solve the solid waste problem - zap it down to tiny size and encase it inside Pokemon toys or something like that. (Maybe China's already attempting that...)

But no shrink-ray here, so I'm stuck piling up old receipts I'm too paranoid to throw away. And reluctantly parting with back numbers of magazines that I might want to re-read someday (not that I even have time to properly read them the first time through...)

One thing I will say about cleaning house; you really feel like you've DONE something when you're done with it.