i am not your mother

i love you, but i'm not your mother - even your mother wouldn't want to clean this up

i walked in the door to the pungent aroma of spilled beer. beer on the floor. beer on the walls. beer everywhere. i stood there frozen, not wanting to walk one more foot into the house. what would be behind the first door? certainly nothing i wanted to clean.

what the heck.

how can you create an entire landfill's worth of mess in one night?? such is the talent of geoff salt.

while i applaud his semi-hungover attempt to clean up, i often find that his cleaning makes more of a mess than the mess itself.

after pausing to suck in one deep and nervous breath, i began my tumultous adventure around the house. the first obstacle i encountered were the stairs up to the kitchen. at one point in time, namely saturday morning, the stairs were a shade of blue, but the masses of drunk twenty year-olds had turned them a shade of brown - maybe mocha. then there was the kitchen. two steps onto the floor and my feet were stuck. while the alcohol all over the tiles created an appealing lustre, it didn't do wonders for my desired mode of transportation. i thought about pulling off my socks and going barefoot (in order to avoid having the socks stick to the floor) but then my feet would have received a sickly goopy coating of left-over beer. needless to say, the journey continued in socks.

i must admit, the kitchen wasn't as bad as it possibly could be or as bad as it has been before. there were glasses littered all over the counter, and sticky beer residue all over the cupboards and walls, but at least the empties had been collected in the garage. i found the kitchen chairs outside in the rain, along with a few pairs of shoes (owners unknown), a few more empties, and some clothes. the broken glass that was littered along the floor had been somewhat cleaned up, but large remnants were still there to be found.

i could go on and describe every room in detailed horror, but i'll refrain for the sake of my brother. let's just say that the family room, laundry room, all three of the bathrooms and all three of the upstairs bedrooms need a bit of an overhaul. a drill and some screws may be required.

maybe i can't leave out the gory details of the laundry room. at first glance, everything looked okay - messy, but okay (my definition of okay had been adjusted after walking through the house. one might usually use the word 'disgusting'). it wasn't until i put in the first load of laundry that i noticed anything remarkably different. apparently in the midst of the chaos, the hose that carries the dirty laundry water was disconnected from the back of the machine. thankfully, the water from the first rinse just emptied into the large laundry basin. i was going to wait until the rinse finished to put the hose back into it's regular pipe, but i got caught up in all of the other housework and homework i needed to do, and so i forgot. at about 11pm i remembered. i didn't remember randomly on my own, but more because of the profanity i heard my brother yell and the way in which he ran to my room and threw open the door. sure enough, the hose had dislodged from its formerly safe position and had poured water from the washing machine all over the laundry room, bathroom, and family room floor. did i mention that the family room is carpeted? 12 ginormous towels later and the tile floor in the laundry room and bathroom were dry. i had to tackle the steam cleaner/carpet cleaner in order to clean up the family room mess. oh my. (shawn). i feel for my mother who has had to use this crazy device regularly in order to contain all the other messes that we've made.

needless to say, coming home to a post-party house is low on my list of favourites. not to mention that after doing all of the cleaning (and attempting to coerce my brother into doing some) i had to feed the dogs/beasts, finish my homework, go to school for 9 hours the next day (not including the 2.5 hours of commuting), shop for groceries, and cook two dinners (one for that and one for today - burritos and homemade chili) so that my brother, who works a 3-11pm shift, would have something to take with him to work for dinner today (and eat when he got home at 11pm last night). there was also more cleaning, more laundry, more dogs/beasts to clean and feed, and a few hours of homework.

i am not my brother's mother, though i definitely feel like i am.