CHEERGEAR or WILL THIS DUST KILL ME? - KEEP SWEEPING.

I guess I'm slightly more adulty/old/boring now. And the current interesting thing to me is this house that I own and have to make better in order to function. So the normal flow of nerdly crap will be interspersed amongst less exciting house crap. Either way you fine readers get some crap to look at. And who doesn't like crap?

Two of the more odious and straight up filthy areas of this creaky old manse are the garage and attic. Unfortunately these are also two of the more useful storage areas. Thus the towering box city we live amongst can't really go anywhere until the grime is dealt with. The basement is rather clean, but there are some damp issues in there that need to be addressed before I entrust much that own in there. Right now it's more of a staging area for debris and junk. I've been dragging around some of these boxes, unopened for about 6 years and they need a new place to rot.

The garage seemed like less of a nightmare, so I went for the easier kill. I set to it armed with a mid-sized shop vac which I named "Old B.O.B.", for hopefully obvious reasons, and an extension cord. Things went swell, I sucked up the bits of crumbly wall, spider webs, leaves, spiders, and crap for about an hour. Moving from corner to corner I set order to the filth. But, like everything, there was a hitch.

As I was happily deleting the debris from a high corner, I smelled a funny smell through my facemask. A smoky sorta funny smell. Old B.O.B. took on a different, high pitched whine, then stuttered a bit. I turn around and my vac-droid is on fire. So, I was finished vaccuuming the garage for the day. A quick trip to Lowes top exchange flamin' B.O.B, and I had a new shop vac. I toyed with naming it Bob II, for Devolutionary reasons, but really wanted to keep Old B.O.B. in the family. SO, Old B.O.B. lives on. I finished the wee bit left in the garage, declared victory and headed up to the attic.

The attic was a goddamn mess. I took no before shots like a dum dum, but folks that seen it already know, it was shitty. Old newspaper type insulation was everywhere. Thick ass linoleum from 1944 was scattered about, broken glass everywhere, wood shards hidden in the insultion, and random crud from the previous owners poked out from corners. Amongst the wreckage, I found a receipt for about $1500 from some place named "Cheergear". This helped explained the 30 or so pairs of tiny white socks (on the invoice) I found and the hundreds of iron-on letters scattered about. GO TEAM ATTIC DWELLER! (BUSEY).

So I'm using a push broom and I note the plume of crap in the air. I prey the respirator will keep me alive and press on. It's hot up in the attic, but honestly, the attic is almost as hot as my friggin' apartment used to be in DC. I start tossig trash bags and wood out the attic window onto the lawn. Then I employ Old B.O.B. once more. I vacuum between every damn floorboard. The space is awesome and ready to be filled with junk. Now I just had to move all that crap up the stairs and then up the attic stairs.

An hour of pain and I was master of my new domain of boxed up crap. Huzzah.