I Change My Pants Again

I am preparing for the coming mother, who will arrive, alongside the coming sister, Friday, February 29th. This, as you might deduce, deuces take it, only happens every four years, though four years ago I wasn't in Europe. They just came to pick me up from school.

February 29th not only marks the leap of every four years and serves as a marker for the Olympics (triumphal return of Carly Patterson?), but it also signals the halfway point of my studies. I have been in Rome for two months, and Friday for me will be a sort of winter solstice, where I'm halfway sad seeing the snow slip through an hourglass, and halfway glad to see the spring, halfway to Christmas. So on the morn of the European Solstice, I'll meet my mom and sister at the airport and start a slow pace on the down hill slope.

Halfway, though, begs some pause (and my mother demands cleanliness), so I took an inventory of my room. The lightbulbs in the overhead light above the bed burnt out four weeks ago. When that happened, I stopped working in my room after dark and used the bathroom light for emergencies. That needs to change. The trash in my room has been filling an old box for two months now; I was hoping that if I piled trash heavy enough into such a box, time and natural pressure might turn out coal, or at least something the consistency of a peat bog. Nothing doing. That needs to change. I did laundry back in January, but I'll be darned if there aren't just as many clothes on the floor now as there were prior to the last winter washing. That needs to change.

I ran out of toilet paper two weeks ago, and for a week scavenged from local restaurants. However, I recently pony'd up and bought a brand new six pack. My mother will be so proud.

After the exhaustive inquiry, I decided that the only things I could immediately change were the clothes that I had on. So I exchanged my current jeans with the ones that I wore my first month here (and that I washed, by golly, until they smelled real nice) and changed socks. I'll have you know that right before I left, Ryan the Southern Gentleman, a very good friend of mine, gave me a three-pack package of socks, which, he claimed, required no washing, even after multiple days of wear. He's a man after my own heart.

Having picked out (and put on) the clothes that I'll wear to the airport on Friday, I decided something had to be done about the state of my apartment. So I went out and rented another apartment for my mother, sister, and I to live in for their week visit. That's a lot easier than cleaning up.