Attempts at cleaning

I tried to do some cleaning this morning. I didn’t want to leave the apartment a huge mess, in the (hopefully small) chance that Brian doesn’t come back to Rieti and gets the opportunity to clean the place up before we turn back the keys to the owners. So I got up early and swept three of the rooms before attempting to mop the floors. There is no mop as such, only mops for dusting, so I had to improvise. I used some old underwear that wasn’t coming home with us due to its pretty yucky (but fairly clean) state. I won’t mention who it belonged to previous to its incarnation as floor cleaner – but it wasn’t any of the girlie kind.
It worked fairly well, and we can now walk around (in those three rooms) without too much concern for blackened feet. I left the rag to soak in the washing tub, thinking that I would do more rooms when I returned from taking Brian to work and Julia “outfit” shopping this morning. We dropped Brian off at work – a nice ritual we have gotten back in the habit of. Way back at the beginning of our marriage, we shared one car, like we are doing this summer. I would take Brian to work (or the metro stop), and then pick him up at the end of the day. We did this for a little over 2 years. It’s been nice to revisit this summer. It’s not feasible to maintain when we are back in the land of big cars and long commutes.
The outfit shopping was a success; Julia was able to find “something Italian” to take back home to wear on the first day of school – AND it was on sale. The stores have great big sales to get rid of the summer stock before the new fall lines come in. Sadly, we couldn’t purchase any of the new fall stuff, as it was all pants and long sleeves – articles that won’t be worn in sunny Santa Clarita for a good three months.
We came back home and she went back to the apartment while I had my morning cup of cappuccino at the bar. Nicely caffeinated, I headed back home, expecting the early morning load of laundry to be finished and ready to switched. Instead, the front loading washing machine didn’t completely drain (as the tub was full of the cleaning rag.) It gushed water out of the door, effectively washing the bathroom floor and drenching everything else. So after the 10 or 15 minutes it took to clean all the water up (without the help of old towels, rags or paper towels like I would have used had I been at home – we had to be creative with newspapers that never got around to being thrown away) I had to re-start the washer with the semi-washed load. This is really going to throw off my timetable of getting the wash done before we leave.
I should have known better than to start cleaning the house.