browser life

From the looks of this blog, it would appear I had vanished into thin air. Not quite. I just didn't use the computer for several days.

I decided I should take advantage of the holiday week since I didn't have aquacise class on Wednesday or much else going on and start CLEANING! It was a much more formidable task than I had expected, but then, it usually is. I started with the living room since it is most visible to visitors.

Found out real quick that there were areas that had NOT been cleaned by the previous owners prior to us moving in, like vents and the top of the blinds. Icky poo yuck! Kept getting dust in my eyes.

Unfortunately, in six days, I've only managed to finish the living room, the dining area and the kitchen. And this is with Dan doing most of the floors and scrubbing the microwave and Chip's kennel. I generally have to rest for about an hour for every 15 minutes of cleaning, which doesn't make me terribly productive.

And I cannot even begin to describe how much pain I've been in! Pretty much evey muscle and/or joint I possess has been in some degree of agony on a daily basis, even on the days I'm not cleaning. I was getting spasms in my back, hands, and shoulders just while stretching in aquacise class today.

So I've consumed more Baclofen and meds with muscle relaxing properties and have donned several Icy Hot patches and have tried my best to carry on without total collapse. Unfortunately, the worse the pain gets, the worse the cognitive dysfunction and incoordination get, so I end up doing things like getting a sudden attack of vertigo while scrubbing the inside of the fridge and falling forward so hard that I actually scoot the entire fridge backward! And in order to further undo all my effort cleaning my kitchen, tonight within fifteen minutes I managed the following: knocked over Dan's half-finished glass of Coke in the fridge, forgot to turn on the stove burner to cook my eggs, missed the skillet when flipping the eggs and spilled them onto the stove, and I dropped the spatula which then caught and tipped a spoon full of cream of rice onto the floor.

Naturally, since I must rest frequently during any cleaning "frenzy", I end up gazing or at least half paying attention to the boob tube in a vain attempt to relax on the couch. Fortunately, there was both a Harry Potter marathon on ABC Family and the Live Earth broadcast on Bravo to keep me entertained. And Dan borrowed some DVDs from our friends, AND there was a Netflix movie in there somewhere.

On Wednesday, Dan and I watched "The 40 Year Old Virgin", which was crude but hilarious. Steve Carrell does geek a lot better than I expected. The bonus material was awesome with tons of ad-libbed footage, some that was even funnier than the movie.

As far as July 4th festivities went, Dan and I did go over to his parents' house for burgers (obviously I just had a patty on a plate) and went through some photo albums I'd brought, but I was too wiped out from cleaning to stay long or go anywhere else. After we got home, I watched some of the "Twilight Zone" marathon on the Sci-Fi channel until it got dark and then took a chair out onto the front porch to watch lightning bugs (a novelty to me as there aren't any in Colorado and I had not seen any since I was a child visiting Little Rock) and to find out if my neighbors did any fireworks. I was not disappointed; even though fireworks are illegal in Sioux Falls, there were plenty of elaborate impromptu displays going on in the park across the street, so many in fact that the ground was rumbling with the noise and Chip was totally freaked out.

On Saturday, I switched on the Live Earth concert coverage at 10am and left it on nearly the entire day until its conclusion. Highlights: Keith Urban and Alicia Keys doing a duet of "Gimme Shelter" by the Rolling Stones; Alicia Keys solo doing songs by Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye plus two of her own; AFI doing "Ziggy Stardust" plus their own stuff; Shakira doing her thang in Hamburg; Melissa Etheridge's scathing tirade against Dubya; the opening number in Johannesburg; Duran Duran at Wembley;
Linkin Park in Tokyo; Lenny Kravitz in Rio De Janeiro. The big finale was the Police re-union, which was admittedly good, but what I liked even better was Roger Waters doing half of "Dark Side of the Moon" and "Another Brick in the Wall".

Yesterday, Dan and I watched "The Village". Weird that it was marketed as a horror movie when it was more like a Hitchcock suspense type film. I figured out that they were actually in modern day long before it was officially revealed, but I did enjoy the story nevertheless.

I had ABC Family's Harry Potter marathon on while cleaning. There were bits and pieces during the breaks discussing "Order of the Phoenix", which was cool because I don't mind spoilers for a movie when I already know the plot. What was even better, though, was an hour-long special on A&E last night where they summed up the story via film so far, speculated as to what will become of Harry and actually showed scenes from Part 5.

Ack. There was more I wanted to say, but my brain is a foggy wasteland at the moment, and I'm a hair's breadth from dozing off. Um, I'm too tired to know if that last bit even made sense.

At least I have scrubbing the toilet to look forward to tomorrow. Woo hoo.