Today I found gold dust in my apartment.
Or to be more accurate, gold fluff.
In the corner of each room there is an old-fashioned radiator. Since I moved in I've been trying not to look too hard at these corners. The floorboards underneath the radiators are grey and bare, either from age or from leak-damage. The hard-to-reach inner ridges of the radiators themselves, as well as the areas around the pipes which lead out of them, are filled with matted dust and fluff. I did a lot of cleaning when I moved in, but these spaces were beyond what I could stomach at the time. Today, as part of my ongoing project to make my house pleasant to live in, I tried to tackle them. I discovered that when the radiators were spray-painted gold, it was done on top of the existing fluff. Bleugh! How many years of other people's dead skin and hair am I living with?
All I have done today is clean and clean. When I moved in I asked for the filthy windows to be washed on the outside, but two and a half months later not even the simple repairs I requested have been dealt with, so I know that the window cleaning will certainly never happen. I thought today, if New Caledonian crows can find a way to get at the snacks scientists hide for them, then surely I can find a way to clean the outsides of my windows. And I did manage some of them, by a mixture of lying on my back with the windows closed onto my shoulders and reaching up as far as I could (which is quite far, if you have arms as long and skinny as mine), and pushing wads of wet cloth down between the gaps between the windows when open and retreiving them at the bottom. Some panes I had to leave in the interests of not knocking the screens onto unsuspecting passers-by, and others in the interests of not falling out myself.
My apartment looks unusually shining and well-ordered, though, if I don't look hard in the direction of the radiators.
Or to be more accurate, gold fluff.
In the corner of each room there is an old-fashioned radiator. Since I moved in I've been trying not to look too hard at these corners. The floorboards underneath the radiators are grey and bare, either from age or from leak-damage. The hard-to-reach inner ridges of the radiators themselves, as well as the areas around the pipes which lead out of them, are filled with matted dust and fluff. I did a lot of cleaning when I moved in, but these spaces were beyond what I could stomach at the time. Today, as part of my ongoing project to make my house pleasant to live in, I tried to tackle them. I discovered that when the radiators were spray-painted gold, it was done on top of the existing fluff. Bleugh! How many years of other people's dead skin and hair am I living with?
All I have done today is clean and clean. When I moved in I asked for the filthy windows to be washed on the outside, but two and a half months later not even the simple repairs I requested have been dealt with, so I know that the window cleaning will certainly never happen. I thought today, if New Caledonian crows can find a way to get at the snacks scientists hide for them, then surely I can find a way to clean the outsides of my windows. And I did manage some of them, by a mixture of lying on my back with the windows closed onto my shoulders and reaching up as far as I could (which is quite far, if you have arms as long and skinny as mine), and pushing wads of wet cloth down between the gaps between the windows when open and retreiving them at the bottom. Some panes I had to leave in the interests of not knocking the screens onto unsuspecting passers-by, and others in the interests of not falling out myself.
My apartment looks unusually shining and well-ordered, though, if I don't look hard in the direction of the radiators.
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