Cleaning my Room -- Thanksgiving post #3

It's that time again. Time to clean my room. It isn't too bad. There's just a bunch of sparkling water cans and stuff. The biggest problem is the cat food spilled everywhere. Cats. Also, I'm still oblivious to the method of clothes management. No one has taught me how to handle clothes. I mean, I was 8 or 9 when I first got the idea that I should always wear at least shorts or underwear.

The reason? I'm preparing for Thanksgiving. I need a clean room with which to play Metroid Prime 3: Corruption in on the big day. Yee!

I had to clear out some tapes which were in my way. I threw out Out for Justice, Waterboy, Above the Law, The Day After Tomorrow, Scrooged, Home Alone 2, An American Tail 1 and (presumably) 2, The Matrix Revisited, The Great Outdoors, and Elektra, among some others, such as Top Gun. I am not a movie fan. In any definition of the word. Movies suck.

Then I ran into a problem. I have stuff in my room that I...don't necessarily need, but don't have reason of space constraint to destroy. One of those things is the Left Behind series. I have books 1-11 of the main series (it's got 4 prequels, I think, and one more "mainquel" that I do not have), and some 10-15 books of the "kids" series. The kids series is 40 books long if memory serves.

While I don't dislike the series entirely, I feel no need for it. Only half of the books are in good condition, and it would be difficult to sell them one by one. I now see how my parents feel. Except, I don't have the 40 years of mental conditioning to hoard everything. Poor guys. They've really raised me and my brother well, all things considered. He (my brother) had 95% of his belongings thrown out a year ago and he still doesn't care. My Dad had 10% of his jun-...belongings thrown out several years ago and it caused mental deterioration to the point that he is unable to remember where anything is or if he still has anything.

So, I suppose I'm going to box them up, then send them to Savers.

OK, they're boxed in an oatmeal box and ready for transport. Now, my room is vacuumed and cleaned. Not necessarily in that order. Instead of cleaning my room, from now on I should just blog about cleaning it. Then it'll get cleaned twelve times faster!


I'll be curious to see if I really have been sleeping badly because of my room; my bed hasn't felt this comfortable for a long while. A long, long while. I am so sleepy. Also, I am catching my Mom's flu or cold or fever or what have you (I am not a mom, so I cannot tell what it is). So tired...now my Mom is having a breakdown and needs me to stay up with her for several hours. I really dislike that darn chihuahua. No one likes him. But he's too pathetic to hate...


My Mom did the Thanksgiving shopping- or at least the brunt of it- today. I can't believe Thanksgiving is 5 days away! And it's almost tomorrow, then it'll be 4! She got cranberries (fresh), canned pumpkin (not "pie flavored"), two pie shells (that's OK, we have two more in the freezer; I have to make two pecan pies to accompany the pumpkin pies), one graham cracker crust, one "shortbread" crust, potatoes, canned yams- fresh yams- and marshmallows, and the turkey.

We aren't sure if we need canned yams to use the marshmallows on or not. We don't want anyone to die...so we'll counsel with a recipe book. I really like the idea of baking marshmallows onto, basically, a potato. And a potato, is, basically, an onion. So it's like spreading marshmallow creme between two slices of onion and calling it a sandwich. I dare you to try it.


She also got the ingredients for the "salad." We call it the "salad" side, but it is a vegetable dip plate (salad's way too much to worry about on Thanksgiving, a veggie plate is not!). Cucumbers, carrots, cauliflower, and celery. We also make a "pickled" plate, which has green olives, black olives, and Clausen pickles. Sadly, in recent years, the black olives...have severely deteriorated in taste and texture quality.

Oh, eww. I got a can of Early California black olives the other day- like the best black olive on the market (that is, for a halfway reasonable price; this is for macaroni salad, people)- and they tasted like olives you get off of a tree uncured. Yuck. Missing was the distinct, sweet, sweet taste of sodium hydroxide.

If you didn't know, sodium hydroxide is "codename," let's say, for "lye." Caustic soda is my favorite term. How...sinister.


...just talking about lye makes me want to not sweat and feel all paranoid and such. If you get a flake of that on your skin...it will react with any moisture on you...and burn the hell out of you, and it feels like a sting. Fun stuff to work with. Your mind plays tricks on you and makes you think you got some on you. My Dad doesn't really mind lye all that much; he worked at a chemical plant (what else would he do with his Master's Degree in pouring?), and I guess lye is nothing compared to some chemicals.

One time, he got some stuff on him that was so bad, apparently he is still irritated by it. It's something to do with what it does to skin cells, I think. I'll interrogate him about it later.

Also, apparently, there's a certain chemical that completely eats up the oxygen from a room. I wonder how easy it would be to kill someone with that. I suppose, this year, since the black olives taste like pure horror, perhaps we should spend a little extra and get those ones in the deli. Because the normal black olives are so bad I reckon soon they won't be able to sell them.


So many tags. 5 days to Thanksgiving!