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That’s a shot of the Verrazano Bridge taken from a street in Sunset Park, Queens (where I now want to live). I love that bridge. UPDATE Sunset Park is in Brooklyn. I must have been suffering from cleaning exhaustion when I wrote that.

So today should be the last day of my Spring cleaning, and all that will be left is the return of my freshly cleaned livingroom rug. Oh, the bliss I will feel then. I will get a pedicure and walk barefoot on my nice clean rug while looking around and admiring my work.

I had a horrible horrible day yesterday due to this company that I had hired to reinstall my air conditioner for me. They are called Airwave, and they have a good reputation in the city, but they were just an absolute nightmare. I will post the story tomorrow after I’ve recovered from the post-traumatic stress of it all. But briefly, they had charged me an arm and a leg to reinstall my air conditioner so that it could be taken in and out of the window easily, but when the window cleaners and I tried to take it out, it wouldn’t come out. I called Airwave and asked them how to do it, and they say it’s easy, but then they were unable to tell me how, and then they wanted to charge me another $100 to take it out for me, and then another $100 to put it back in. Can you believe it? It actually gets worse.

The window cleaners and upholstery cleaners come this morning! Soon my apartment will be sparkly fresh and spring clean. And now, a Spring photograph. These are cherry blossoms at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. Which reminds me, can someone tell me why flowers don’t smell as strongly as they used to? We walked through a row of lilac bushes and the smell should have knocked us unconscious, but I could barely smell them.

– Bathroom painted, everything in the room washed, replacement wall shelves ordered.

– Bedroom curtains washed, blinds cleaned, rug shook out on roof, pad underneath the rug replaced.

– Plants dusted, pruned, soil added.

– Bus tickets to Boston ordered for June 2 (my reward/birthday thing). Along those lines, started picking up what I need to give myself a little sprucing up, starting with good scissors to cut my bangs.

– Arranged for upholstery cleaning guys to come in tomorrow to do the couch and my office chair.

– Tomorrow and Thursday will be the major cleaning days. The window guys will be here to do the windows (while I hide the cats and myself, I can’t bear to watch, their balancing act while washing the windows is too scary).

… in my adult years I should say (years after 30). I had some pretty bad ones in my youth. Okay, this one is really tame, but still. Spring cleaning has begun and I started with painting my bathroom. It was looking so dingy. Oh God, if ever there was a more miserable, tedious way to pass the precious few hours we have in life–I’ve painted plenty of rooms in my day, but I’d forgotten what it’s like.

The main thing is I couldn’t reach everywhere and the room is so small the ladder only fit inside in one way, so to get all the other spots that needed to be painted, I had to teeter on boxes (filled with all my Duke research) and stretch and strain and push, and one coat looked like hell so I had to do that all TWICE.

Oh God, this post is not capturing the horror. Oh and the off-white color I selected looks too yellow-y on the walls. The one good thing is the pretty new sparkly looking shower curtain I put up afterwards.

I found out there’s a bus to Boston that leaves from Chinatown every hour and only costs $35 round trip!! (I’m the last to know.) I was going to go yesterday, but then I decided it would make a fun birthday thing to do so I’m going next month.

But I bought these books Thursday night, when I still thought I might go yesterday. Three were from an NPR list of great science fiction books, and one, The Brief History of the Dead, was from another NPR list by the same person, but I forget the theme. But any book that imagines what it’s like to be dead is for me!