Well, I’ve been away on vacation for a bit, enjoying weddings and camping and catching up on sleep. It was seriously lovely and needed. So, I’m back to the city and back to the jobby job. I decided to spend last weekend doing some serious cleaning and organizing of the apartment. It’s often seemed to me that the state of my apartments usually are a pretty good match for the state of my brain, meaning that if the kitchen counters are so full of dirty dishes and groceries not put away, there is just not space to try to cook anything new. And life has probably been too hectic (or I’ve gotten too careless) to do much about it. If the home office floor is cluttered with items I haven’t taken the care to put away yet, and I have a desk full of neat to-do piles that haven’t been touched in 4 months, it’s probably time to do something. It’s hard to move on to bigger and better things when the things you should have done months ago are still staring you in the face and getting heavier with dust. So, I went to work, and I did a fine job. I took two whole days to straighten up, whittle down those to-do piles and projects, write in my journal and dust, vacuum and scrub. Was feeling pretty good. However, there was a smell. A nagging smell. Every time I sat down to my computer. Like old garbage. Like forgotten food. And it was getting worse each day. Seeing as how I was working so hard to clean things out, this was getting more and more frustrating just as the smell was getting stronger and stronger. Finally, it got strong enough that I could locate a general area of odor, and I sniffed it out. I found the bookshelf of notes that it was coming from. The shelf contains 3-ring binders full of my old class notes from medical neuroscience and anatomy. I loved those classes, and I love those notes. (Nerd.) I realize I have to go through those books. And I don’t want to, but I must. Sure enough, after shaking out about 4 notebooks, out falls something furry and black. And so stinky…
a dead BAT!
What the! So, I dealt with it, and it’s out of the house now. I still don’t know how that bat got in there and died while I was away on vacation. And, I don’t want to read too much into the symbolism here, but if the state of my apartment is really representing the state of my brain… I need to get back to work!
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| A perfect vacation sunset over the St. Lawrence River. |
