on tuesday i came home to the answering machine message from hell. the landlord is going to visit wednesday morning (the next day!) because of some sort of mortgage, assessment, i don't know. i was too panicked by the thought of even this sudden drop by appearance. all i know was i was home alone and the home was a mess. i have to leave in the morning for work so i knew everything has to be done tonight. just as the message was ending, twiddle thumbs called my cell phone. i thought she was going to comment on the message but she had not heard it yet. she will be gone for a few hours at class which means i have to get my ass in gear and do a lot of things.

ever since i moved out of my mother's house all those many moons ago, i have not lived at a place where i need to take care of a yard. therefore, i do not have yard tools. the back patio is an overgrown mess. i was planning on cleaning it up one day so i do have some gardening gloves and some really old nasty shears. i go for it. after an hour i am tired of it. i've seen too many snails and spiders. it's getting dark besides. i then spend an hour doing dishes. some place along the way i started working on cleaning a stain on the balcony caused by the barbecue. i had recently bought some chemical product that i thought might do the trick but hadn't tried it yet. then it was time for me to go pick up twiddle thumbs.

we got some fast food dinner and watched "the restaurant". we were as freaked out on stress as the people in that show. it was incredible. then we went to the patio and started putting all the yard trash into garbage bags. there were a lot of bags! we did this for probably another hour. then we had to go around the complex finding trash bins that weren't full. fuck it, i made them fit. some neighbor wondered what the commotion was when all they could have possibly heard is trash being thrown away at 10pm. is that a crime? when we first moved in a very similar thing happened. right after work we would drive over and put a couple boxes in the garage. then at about 10 or 11pm someone came out of their place to see what the hell was going on. again, nothing noisy, just drive up, open garage, put boxes in, close garage and leave. but they were looking at us like we were slaughtering cows or something at 4am. so we stopped for the evening. it's funny how white people actually do the neighborhood watch thing!

then i focused on checking in on the balcony stain and working on another stain in the garage. some garbage bag had leaked and left this awful stain (cow's blood?) that was again something i was going to get to anyway, but i was forced to take care of it immediately. i sprayed every cleaning chemical i had in the house on that stain. it was my experiment to see which was the best. i have learned that the stain remover called shout works best of all on dried up blood. if i ever have to clean up a crime scene, i can rely on shout! a quick cleaning of the bathrooms and throwing everything in the closet helped to sort out the rest of the house. the next day i didn't hear any complaints and i'm still not sure what's going on except that some muscles still ache ;)