stevenpiziks | House, Garage, and Iron

Saturday, we hit critical mass. For various reasons, the housework had been rather neglected lately. The house was a =mess.= And then there was the garage. It was piled with junk, a lot of it garbage that had been too big to break up easily when it was cold out, and some of it stuff that just hadn't been put away properly. It was almost impossible to get around in there. The house and the garage had hit critical mass for me, and it was time to Clean Up.

First came the house. Everything was put away properly. The bathrooms were given a good going-over. The shower curtains were taken down and washed. Floors were mopped. It wasn't really spring cleaning, but it was close.

Thence to the garage. First was the dreadful job of disposing of the border rails of the garden plot we'd torn up two weekends ago. The trash company had refused to take them, so they'd been sitting on the front lawn. I piled half of them into the hatchback--they stuck out like a mutant rooster tail--and Sasha and I drove to the dump. The car was riding very low, and I was glad we hadn't tried to put in more than half. The dump charges by the cubic yard, and when we got there, the guy in the office told me the charge was $22, minimum. Per trip.

"Oh," I said. "Look, the rails I have in the car are all I could safely haul, and that's about half of what I need to dump. They're also half a cubic yard. Can't we pretend it's all one trip? I'm going to do both trips right away. I really don't want to pay a charge for two cubic yards when I'm only dumping one."

In the end, the man let himself be persuaded. Sasha and I dumped the rails, returned quickly back home to load up the rest, and drove back to the dump before he could change his mind. Whew!

Then it was the garage proper. The boys and I hauled everything out into the driveway. M----, one of the neighbor kids who Sasha and Mackie sometimes plays with, wandered by and offered to help. I put him to work. We crushed cardboard for recycling (a huge job), dumped trash into the garbage bins for pickup, put sleds into the back shed, and more. The pushbroom handle was broken, so I used the leaf blower to clear the floor. Then we started putting everything back in. A pile of stuff ended up at the curb, including two car seats that we can't use anymore and a tricycle Mackie outgrew.

Now there's plenty of clear space in the garage! Yay!

Afterward, we went to see IRON MAN. We offered to take M---- with us, since he helped so much. He dashed home to get permission, and his mother came over to confirm. Off we went.

The movie was really good. I wasn't a big Iron Man comic reader, though I was familiar enough with it. The reviews I'd read were overall very positive but said the movie lost focus in the end, being unsure who or what Tony Stark was fighting. I disagreed with that assessment, but that may be because I was familiar with the comic. The movie's third act came straight from the comics. I loved Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark. He was wonderful in the role and captured the character extremely well. I wouldn't have thought to cast Gwyneth Paltrow as Pepper Potts, but she was fantastic as well. The timing and energy in their scenes together was excellent. The Iron Man armor was a treat to watch, too. Highly recommended.