Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

A day of swimming and pottering about, during which I finally discovered a practical use for my bouldering skills: balancing on my window sills while I cleaned a couple of years of filth off the outside of the panes. I always say this but I can't believe the difference it makes: not only is the view much improved, but I can even see my reflection in the glass again.

After I mentioned that I needed to take some of my clothes to the dry cleaners, the person I was talking to confessed that they'd never done their own laundry. I wondered how they'd managed to survive university. It turned out they'd relied on maternal visits every two weeks to keep them in clean clothes. But the funniest bit was that they mentioned that they didn't even realise that they needed to wash their bed linen and, because the madre didn't realise that it was being done, it went unwashed for most of their first year...

According to the Guardian, showering is on the decline. I don't think this will come as news to anyone who has worked in the physical sciences for any length of time...

Finally fed up with the illegibility of the screen on my cellphone, I decided that the time had come to see if I couldn't take the thing to pieces and give it a good clean. Rather to my surprise, the task of getting the front off turned out to be suprisingly trivial.

But once I got the thing open, I was shocked by the sheer quantities of cruft contained therein. Seriously. The interior contained more fluff than the lint basket of a tumble dryer. I hadn't realised my pockets were quite so filthy.

My God, but the cable-work under my desk was in a truly squalid state: miles of knotted wire, thick layers of dust and cobwebs, all sitting on top of a filthy area of carpet. Thus, when I decided that today was the day to decommission my two ancient Dell servers — a Poweredge SP466 and an XPS Pro200n — I found myself face down in foulness.

Confronted with this horror, my sense of fastidiousness — never one of my primary motivators — was sufficiently appalled to compel me to disconnect everything and spent a couple of hours cleaning and rewiring. The task was, needless to say, absolutely awful but, having done it, I now feel a glowing sense of accomplishment. More than once, post-cleanup, I've caught myself trying to come up with reasons to look under the desk just so that I can admire the lack of clutter. Let's hope it lasts.

Pursuing the aforementioned squinches and spandrels, I notice that I have allowed my copy of Darwin's Dangerous Idea to gather a certain amount of dust. I now feel intolerably guilty, not for being so slatternly as to allow the dust to gather in the first place, but rather for allowing so much time to have elapsed since last I dipped into Dennett's masterpiece.

I've got a bad habit. Instead of throwing bits of chewing gum away, I'll stick them to coins, bits of crockery, computer keyboards, anything that's handy. Today, whilst doing the washing up, this vile custom came back to haunt me in a totally disgusting way.

Picture the scene. I washing the cutlery, absently listening to radio, when I noticed something not unlike a chuck of dead mollusk lurking in the depths of the sink. Given that I keep my household animal flesh free, this was somewhat surprising. In the end, I discovered that this piece of unpleasant rogue matter was a stale bit of gum that I'd stuck on a the bottom of a plate for later use.

Talk about splicktastic. I like totally grossed myself out.

After throwing out three years worth of New Scientists, 1996–99 if you're curious, I feel like I've won a minor victory against the evil forces of entropy. I also feel like I've successfully differentiated myself from the rest of the gang who, after quarter of a century or more, have yet to decide how they're going to redecorate the kitchen...

Read the following in an article about cleaners the other day:

The thing about very left-wing people is, their houses are incredibly dirty. They are too right-on to employ a cleaner, but too lazy to clean the house themselves."

The truth of this can be found by examining the sayings and actions of Karl Marx. His house was so notoriously filthy that a Prussian spy, upon visiting Casa Marx, refused to sit on Marx's sofa because he was convinced it was so dirty it would ruin his trousers.