I spent the weekend cleaning the basement. I really enjoyed doing it . That’s for some special definitions of “enjoy”, of course. I mean, nobody likes crouching behind the furnace with a shopvac, but if you feel like you’re Doing Right by your family, and it’s something you’ve been meaning to do for two years, and there’s a dumpster right outside to make it easy to get rid of the crap you’re sucking up, and — in particular — the shopvac you’re borrowing is basically fueled by a rocket engine and makes anything in a four-inch radius simply vanish, then it’s not really that much a hardship, either.

I’d attach pictures, but they look just like what you’d expect:

• BEFORE: Fairly cluttered basement with rubble in the corners and thirty years’ worth of dryer lint furred on the pipes. Gigantic wing-chair with deep cat-claw scarring sheds horsehair in the corner.
• AFTER: Incrementally less cluttered, with visible corners and clean (but not washed) pipes. Gigantic stuffing-leaking wing-chair still present, after some soul-searching about cat’s single sacred refuge in the wide world.

Nobody’s going to mistake our basement for a freshly-painted rumpus room now, but neither are they going to mistake it for a HAUNTED SPIDER HOLE and start tapping the walls listening for immured prisoners.

Since I felt so virtuous knocking semi-permanent wooden structures apart and carrying them piecemeal, dusty and tainted with cat pee, out to the curb, I didn’t pay that much attention to my Weight Watchers over the weekend, and as a result I got a Big Fat Surprise this morning. Goddamn it. Now I have to eat like a @#$@# squirrel this week if I want to be able to claim any sort of forward progress. The trouble with wanting to be a skinny person is you have to eat like a skinny persion, and skinny people eat BORING FOOD. And not much of it.

Okay, here’s a photo after all: