Further adventures in domesticity

I always thought that living in a bigger space would mean less cleaning. And before your head explodes from this seeming lack of logic, let me explain: when I was living in dust-bunny junction, aka my teeny tiny garden cottage of hell in Parkhurst, replete with a landlady who went out of her way to make me feel as awful and unwelcome as possible (all for a mere R3000 a month!), even contemplating cleaning was impossible. This may have had something to do with the fact that I was too afraid to move from one end of the cottage with more than a swoosh of socked feet, or it may have had something to do with the fact that it was so small in there I couldn't fit a broom between the couch and the wall. So no matter how hard I tried to keep things tidy, it never, ever worked. So when we decided to take an apartment with three bedrooms, I could almost pee with excitement at the thought of all that dust disappearing into corners I would never have to go near.
And then.
Let's just say that Paul and I have had a bit of trouble dividing up, or coping with, the daily labour involved in keeping a seven room apartment clean. It doesn't help that we have two hyperactive cats whose one true love happens to be shredding entire rolls of toilet paper and then re-enacting the wedding scenes from Sense and Sensibility, complete with home made confetti. Then theres the pooping. Not ours, obviously, this is not that kind of blog. The cats.

Sweet. Jesus. Crackers.

I'm actually a little afraid of going into detail here, lest I lose whatever tiny readership I may possess. Lets just say that more often than not cleaning out the litterbox prompts lengthy conversations about how in hell THAT came out of THAT.

When we're not cleaning, we're complaining about our neighbours. I haven't even begun to touch on this subject, mostly because I've never actually seen any of them. Whenever I am outside and I hear someone approaching, I make like the cats and scram. We are surrounded on either side by a hugely fat gay man and his toy boy, a crazed trance hippy and yet another hugely fat gay man. All three apartments, at various times of the day, throb to the beat of various kinds of very bad computer generated music. Usually it's the techno tannie next door with the incessant hum of a drug fuelled party for one. But sometimes, just sometimes, we are treated to the sublime sounds of Donna Summer and the Supremes.

Those are the good times.