Der Feuervogel aufersteht.

Ben and I are very lazy people. Neither of us is particularly fond of cleaning the house. We tend to give the living room a thorough (relatively speaking) cleaning only when we're having a party, which hasn't happened in a goodly time, mainly because of a lack of funds to throw one.

We have cats, as you know. This means our carpets (wall to wall in 80% of the house) are basically covered in cat litter and cat hair. It's pretty gross. I'd like to replace the 11-year-old, cat-puke-stained carpet with laminate flooring, but there's no money for that. (We'll need to before we sell the house, because apparently you can't sell houses with nasty carpeting. I'd like to do it soon enough that we can actually enjoy said new flooring, but, well, income. I have none.)

So Friday afternoon I vacuumed downstairs and the bottom half of the stairs. I moved furniture and everything. Then Saturday, Ben and I finished the stairs, and I did the upstairs, digging out the mini shampooer to go over some pee spots. Irritatingly, the main vacuum doesn't have attachments, so we have to dig out a broom vac (the kind for wood floors or industrial carpeting) that does so we can get against the walls and in the corners.

So my goal now is to vacuum every other week at least, because the floors were really gross. And maybe we can make some headway into getting out the ancient layers of cat hair in the carpets.

I've got a very low tolerance for clutter, which, let me tell you, makes living with Ben really difficult at times. He never gets rid of anything. Judging by the probably 25-years'-worth collection of magazines in his parents' basement, I'm guessing it's genetic.

Our closet is overcrowded, you can't see the floor for boxes and piles (that are at least half his stuff) in the bonus room, and it's driving me up the wall. I've got a couple boxes full of things for either charity or a yard sale that just need to go (clothes & shoes mostly), but I can probably get a couple more easily. I'd like to convince Ben to help out, get rid of some of his things, but I've pretty much given up on that ever happening, or happening to an extent such that it makes a lick of difference. (He's going to have to make some really hard decisions if he moves with me to Berlin. We'll have half as much space as we do now at *MOST*, and I'll be damned if he's going to get 80% of it to keep his random papers from 7th grade and every card he's ever gotten, plus his toys. Yes, I find it rather frustrating that I'm getting rid of, or have gotten rid of, a fairly significant amount of things, and he's barely gotten rid of anything, and has, in fact, gotten MORE things.)

So, anyway. I'd like to start tackling the house room by room, saying keep or sell to everything. I'd also like to be able to walk through the bonus room to get to my bookshelf, but the 3 boxes of MORE THINGS from his parents house that have arrived since Christmas are in the middle of the fucking floor, in front of the tons of crap that's been sitting there for years. I'm just plain sick of it. (And if he's seriously considering putting the air mattress in the bonus room so my mom can sleep there, he needs to get all that shit out so there's space for it. And sell those motherfucking MAGIC cards already. They've been here ... two years now? Three? And he promised to sort them and sell valuable ones before he had his parents ship them here. All 24 pounds of them, which doesn't include the binder that holds the last deck he made.)

I made some progress in sorting memorabilia from traveling by putting postcards into photo sleeves and things like that. I'd like to scan the millionty photo albums that are sitting around in boxes, but there are a ton of them, and it'll take forever. Also, a lot of the photos are really shit, from my cheapo, no-focus 110-mm camera that I had from 3rd-10th grade. So, fun and a lot of sorting. Except they're in the back corner of the bonus room, and I can't really get them *out* of the bonus room without hurting myself.

My scanner also does negatives, so I could do some of those while I'm at it. I wonder where the Photoshop Elements CD that came with the scanner is. Last I saw it, Ben was installing it on his iMac. I also wonder if it'll work on my laptop anyway. It's installed on my Mini, but I almost never use that. (And PSE has a tendency to crash if you look at it funny.)

I want to go through my closet and get rid of clothes I never wear or that don't fit well or that are just 15 years out of style. I have so many t-shirts, and I wear... 5? 8? I don't want to get rid of many work clothes, just in case I get a real job again and need to look presentable. I have way more clothes than I need.

My sewing room terrifies me, but I need to get in there and sort that wreck out. I'll save it till last. I can't do anything to the bonus room, because most of what's in there isn't mine, and as much as I'd like to say "tough shit" and pitch it, I can't.

We are both lazy people, and every little organizational trick I've tried to keep the kitchen table from being a stack of papers with no room to eat has failed. We just leave things on tables, counters, the floor, wherever we decide to set them down, and they stay there until I get pissed off enough by the clutter to force Ben to pick up his shit while I pick up mine. I'd really love it if I didn't have to clean an entire room to find one thing I was looking for, but that's never going to happen.

I tweeted about this last week and meant to elaborate here, but I forgot.

Scene: last Wednesday, I'd come home from tai chi class, changed, and flopped on the couch with my phone to catch up on the twitter I'd missed. Ben's at the other end, and he starts talking about this trailer he downloaded on his PS3 for Call of Duty: Black Ops. (He wont get the game; he just likes trailers.)

Ben: Is there some famous music video from the 80s where two guys are standing on opposite sides of the Berlin Wall, then start rocking out on guitars?

Me: Huh?

Ben: I downloaded this trailer for Call of Duty, and it HAS to be a reference to something, because it looks that way.

Me: Maybe I'd recognize it if I saw it?

Ben: [fires up the PS3 and the TV, starts playing this video]

Me (before the rating box has even left the screen): That's the Scorpions' "Wind of Change," dumbass. (laughing)

I would like to point out that at NO point did he mention that this trailer had an actual pop song in the background, as opposed to commissioned video game music. There may have also been a digression at one point about how it wouldn't have been logistically possible for people to stand on opposite sides of the wall at that time, given the death strip on the eastern side. (Though when the song was released in 1990, it would have been, in some areas.)

ETA: This is the video I'm a lot more familiar with. And now I know why the one I had bookmarked vanished. Guess what you'll be seeing again on 9 November.

Yesterday we got our first snow of the year. It's a little early for NC, and it was 70 a week ago. We got about an inch, I guess, and it's mostly gone from my yard today. The other side of the street, that gets less sunlight, is still snowy.

Of course, we'd planned to put up the lights yesterday, and we *cough*Ben*cough* waited too long to miss the snow, so we put up lights while it was alternating between snowing and sleeting. Fun.

Today I upgraded to Scrivener 2.0, and I look forward to getting to know it. Then I spent an hour beating my head on physics so I could decide a plot point. I don't really like either version, but I think the way I'm changing it will make sense. And I'm trashing another pointless, repetitive scene. I just have to figure out how to incorporate the handful of important details into the scene that follows, which I'm leaving in.

And god, I'm never going to finish these revisions in time to use this bloody thing for my VP application, and since I want to shop V1 around (if it gets rejected), I can't use it. Which means I have NOTHING for my application.

Argh.