Procrastination

Lets start at the beginning...


I moved to North Carolina in August of '06. I got a 3 bedroom, 1200 sq ft apartment with a laundry room. All for myself. The original intention was that Ashley was going to move down in a year and go to school at UNCW with me. She even went so far as to be accepted but decided against it for whatever her reason. So I had a 3 bedroom apartment and needed roommates because although my dad was giving me money it would be impossible to live on it without help with the rent.

First came Savannah. She moved in September of '06. Her sister lived in the apartment across the breezeway from mine and she was living with her for a couple weeks until she could find her own place, because like me, she had just moved down here. She was 2 years younger than I and in school. She and I got along pretty well so I decided 'what the hell' and let her move in. Unfortunately, among other issues, she had a boyfriend who didn't have a car and was ALWAYS with her. So essentially I got 2 new roommates with her.

Then came Tony. He was a friend from NY who just wanted a change in venue so i said "sure, come on down." I didn't know him that well but our best friends had dated so we had hung out a couple times and got along pretty well. He moved in October '06 with a cat, Smokie.

At this time I only had 2 cats of my own, Coley and Bella. At the complex I am at you are allowed 2 pets, so we were already over the limit when Tony came but didn't really worry about it because who really notices the differences between 2 cats and 3??

Then Tony got another cat, Little, shortly after he moved in because he and I should NEVER be allowed to go into a petsmart together. There is no self control.

So Tony, Savannah and I lived together with 4 cats (Savannah did bring home a dog one time but that lasted about a week before we made her get rid of it because she didn't have enough time to take care of it and Tony and I didn't want to) until December when a disagreement between Savannah and I ended up with her moving out...at my request.

Then I got Phillip (my dog) around April '07. With this event came the permanent baby gate that separates my apartment, to this day, into "cat zone" (the bedrooms) and "dog zone" (the family room, dining room, kitchen, laundry room).

Then around May '07 Tony's best friend Zack, also from NY, moved down to live with us. He came with no pets, which was nice, except all 3 of us made the mistake of going into Petsmart together and came back with another cat, Princeton.

At this point I lived with 2 boys, 5 cats and 1 dog.

This arrangement didn't last too long before Tony and Zack realized that they did not and could not make enough money to live on their own and moved back to NY, ultimately into their parents homes, in October '07.

To this day I live by myself, my 2 cats and my dog. And that's the way I like. I need my space. I like things my way. It's just easier for everyone.

So what does this whole story have to do with procrastination??

CLEANING.

Throughout all of my many roommates the apartment has become a disaster. Work orders for repairs that needed to be done have been dismissed because of too many pets to hide from apartment complex employees. Things have been stained, broken, ripped up, etc. by pets and people. And now I am moving out in less than 3 months and I realize that if I want to be able to not pay a ton of money in repairs I need to start getting my act together now.

First comes the immediate problem which has been created by myself and my pets only, MESS.

My name is Gillian and I am an extremely dirty person.

Not my actual body, I myself shower regularly and only wear clean clothes but my apartment is....disgusting. I am not a good cleaner. The build-up of disaster does not bother me. Never has.

I am going home for Fall Vacation from school, leaving October 1st. My dog is staying at my friend Megan's and the cats will stay here alone with someone to check on them a couple times. With the absence of myself and my dog, my goal is to have a list of things that need to be legitimately repaired by the apartment complex given to them and have them fix it while I am gone. Because if they fix them now, they can't charge me for it later. These things are all things that they should fix but I am afraid that if I move out without telling them prior I will get charged because its all stuff I should have told them about to fix in a timely manner. (did you get all that? the logic is a little roundabout but I understood it) I will pretend that it all just happened and hasn't been building up for years. But for this plan to work I need to have my apartment acceptably clean before I leave, which it is far from. Maybe I will take 'before' and 'after' pictures and post them once it is clean so you can get the full extent of how dirty I truly am.

So right now I need to organize, vacuum, dust, scrub, just plain CLEAN so that fix-it men can come in and fix my variety of problems including leaking sinks, toilets and windows, water stains on the ceiling, lights fixtures falling out, screens with holes in them, paint chipping off the tub (are you supposed to paint tubs??) and more.

Once that phase of the cleaning plan is complete then comes the fixing of stuff that's MY fault. And by MY, I mean Phillip, Bella, Coley, Tony, Zack, Smokie, Little, Princeton, Savannah and myself.

This includes more stuff than I care to type out because then I may actually realize the enormity of the task at hand here.

But not to get too far ahead of myself, right now I am really procrastinating against the cleaning of the mess. The rest of the story was just may was of procrastinating. And now that it is told I will go clean...oh wait? is that my phone ringing? "wanna come hang out?" Guess the cleaning will be left for later...