Casey, if you’re reading this and it’s before Tuesday, stop now. It’s supposed to be a surprise.

Anyway, on to the bloggyness.

I got up somewhat early for a Sunday morning. it was pushing noon. I usually wake up somewhere between 2 and 4pm due to my vampiric ways, but I had a lot of work to do.

Today, I cleaned the upstairs.

Let me give you an example of how bad the ‘upstairs’ is.

The upstairs consists of a bedroom. The stairs leading up to it are about 2 1/2 feet wide and very steep. The room was used for storage, and the cats. There were 3 litter boxes, and various other things up there. The upstairs has not been touched, aside from me just tossing things up there to get them out of the way, in almost 5 years.

5 years of cat litter, and other various cat-things. Garbage, paper, things the cats dragged up there .. things the cats destroyed but couldn’t drag down, things the cats did, and things the cats didn’t do. Over 5 years, actually.

With life being very busy the last few years, I really just forgot about it. I’d go up there to change the litter boxes, and think to myself “I need to clean this up” .. and then I’d forget about it for another week or so until I changed the litter boxes again.

Today, I set aside ’spring cleaning’ time to clean up the upstairs. I figured it would take me a few hours or so, as long as I had my parents 15 gallon Shop-vac.

That’s where I hit my first snag.

The Shop-vac was up at the cottage. My dad was planning on buying another one for at home anyway, and since he’s a nice guy, he ran out to buy a new one. Little did I know it wasn’t going to be one of the big-ass 15-gallon 4.5hp ones with the hose that could suck up an aerosol can.

It was the small 5-gallon 2hp one, with the hose the size of a normal $50 vacuum cleaner.

I’m not going to complain (much), but it did take a lot longer than I had planned. I emptied the vac out twice (lots of cat litter on the floor, they had managed to cover it up with some bits of the old boxes I had up there) I had to pick everything up, I hauled 3 trash-bags out, and 6 boxes full of crap (including other boxes). I threw out hard drive boxes, video card boxes, sound card boxes, software boxes, and even my X-Box box. I’m normally a pack-rat but I just was in one of those moods.

The upstairs now looks immaculate. The things I was storing are stacked neatly on the sides of the room, the litter boxes are arranged neatly throughout. My eyes are watering and I’m completely stuffed up from allergies. The spiderwebs up there were horrible, and I cleaned most of those up as well. I feel like I have a thin film of eau-de-cat-litter covering me, but I don’t know if I can stand long enough to take a shower. You see, the upstairs has a pitched roof, with only enough room to stand up straight in the very center of the room. This of course adds +6 to the difficulty of cleaning, as you either have to do it all on your knees, or bent over. I hit my head at least 5 times, and fear I may have a concussion.

Anyway, that was how I spent my Sunday. I think I rather would have gone to church.

Stay tuned, I’ll have my Opera vs Firefox comparison coming up this week!