BabyStep 13: I'm On A Mission

Ow.  Ouch.  Owie. Whimper.  Whine.  In other words, I hurt!  Friday afternoon I somehow managed to crack off a corner of my back lower molar while munching on some of my roommate's Captain Crunch (shhh, don't tell!), and since then I have been in agony.  The tooth itself doesn't hurt at all; in fact, I didn't even know I had done it until the sharp edges the break created started to slice into my tongue.  I'm not being overly dramatic either.  My tongue lies (lays?) right up against this tooth, waaay in the back of my mouth, and I can't even swallow without the side of my tongue scraping up against these little razor blade edges.  It.  Is.  Torture. 

Since then I haven't been able to talk, eat, swallow, or even sleep properly.  Someone suggested I use a nail file to dull the tooth edges until I could get to a dentist, but since I am uninsured the nail file is as close to a dentist's instrument my tooth is gonna see for awhile.  I chiseled away at it the best I could, and it seems to have helped a little.  I still have to pop Tylenol and Ibuprofen a couple times a day to keep the swelling in my tongue down (did I mention this has made my tongue swell?), and I'm praying all the talking I will have to do at work tomorrow doesn't undo the little healing that has taken place.  Sigh. 

The point of all this whining?  Well, let's just say I have been in so much pain I took a FlyLady break Friday night and all day Saturday.  Cause really, considering this pain ranked right up there with the time I had my wisdom teeth all removed with Novocaine ONLY, and NO pain meds afterwards, I really didn't give a bleepity-bleep if my sink was shiny.  Not one iota.  But it's OK, I think I've made up for my lapse in productiveness today.  Which leads me to: BabyStep 13: Pick one of Kelly's Missions and do it.

This step is supposed to be our introduction on how FlyLady breaks your home into Zones to keep it what my mother refers to as "Company Clean" all the time.  I'll speak more on Zones in a later post, as I am having a bit of a conundrum about it.  And by the way, for those of you not in the know, Kelly is one of FlyLady's minions sidekicks.  Sort of like Batman and Robin.

I went as directed to Kelly's Page O-Missions and picked the one I could muster up the will power wanted to do.  This week FlyLady is in Zone 1 (front entrance, front porch and dining room), so all the Missions pertained to that area.  I don't have a dining room (heck, we don't even have a kitchen table), so the dining room missions were out.  I don't really have a front entrance either, so front porch (balcony) it is! 

My Mission was to sweep down this area and make it all purdy again as it the first thing people see when they enter our homes.  Not really true in this case, as I am pretty much the only one who goes out on the balcony, but I did it anyway.  I apologize in advance for these pictures, my digital camera was misbehaving so I had to take them with my iPhone:

The above shot is the balcony, in all it's undecorated glory.  This is the before pic.  I swept away as many of those stupid little helicopter-seed things from the nearby tree, though most decided to just get stuck in between the cracks of the floor.  I also got out a bucket of hot water and floor cleaner to hose down the patio table.  If you look closely, you can see a film of pollen has collected on the glass.  It was gross.  There is no after pic as you wouldn't really be able to see much of a difference anyway, but trust me, I spent 1/2 an hour doing all this.

I also took the liberty of sweeping the inside stairs that lead up to our and one other apartment, and am now considering it my "front entrance area." In reality this is a common area, which basically means we all use it but no one takes the responsibility to sweep it. I did it a few weeks ago just to be nice, but no one has touched it since and some new dust bunnies were forming on the stairs.  Buh-bye bunnies!

That's about it.  Mission complete.  I would however, like to share with you one last pic:

This is the broom I used to do all this sweeping.  My roommate made it.  With his own two hands.  We both work at a living history museum where we dress up in funny clothes and pretend it's the 19th Century.  I love it.  He is doing it until he can get a full-time teaching job.  Regardless, he spent all last summer making brooms.  It's a handy little skill!  If the world ended tomorrow and we somehow survive, he has the know-how to keep us the tidiest little nuclear-mutants around.