Only a Couple of Days Late for Spring Cleaning

I feel like the stereotypical person who has to clean the house so it's clean enough for the maid, but there is a good reason for spending all day today boxing up the piles of (mostly) books all over the house, throwing away several bags of old papers, and otherwise cleaning house. The carpet steam cleaners will be here tomorrow, and they'll only clean the carpets that are exposed, so I need to get as much carpet exposed as possible. I ended up moving six Xerox boxes of books to the storage closet (With the other stuff in there, there's not much room for anything else after that), and putting three paper shopping bags of old papers into the recycle bin. I dusted many places, and for good measure vacuumed the house, on the grounds that steam cleaning may work better if the more obvious debris is already cleaned up. And what a lot of gunk was there to clean up!

It's hard to get me started on a clean-up job, but once I do start, I tend to pursue it with some determination. However, I'm sometimes easily side-tracked. For example, while vacuuming in the dining area, I noticed that the reason the light has been so subdued in there is because the lamp hanging over the dining table was all crudded up -- I bet it's been years since anyone cleaned it. So I stopped, got out the step stool, and cleaned that light fixture before getting back to the main vacuuming job.

When I was done, the house looked much neater, although I still expect to have to move stuff out to the patio tomorrow morning temporarily to maximize the areas that the cleaners can get at. Included in this is the large box of Match Game material and other things going to Westercon.

After a day of packing boxes, carrying boxes around, and vacuuming, I was exhausted. But apparently not sufficiently exercised, as I just got a much-too-high 181 blood sugar reading, the highest I've had in four months. I really should go out and take a long walk, but I'm just too tired.

Beating Norton Into Submission

I seem to have managed to get Norton Internet Security 2006 beaten back sufficiently that it works without overwhelming my computer. I conclude that NIS/Norton Anti-Virus wasn't the culprit, but Norton SystemWorks. With NSW uninstalled, my hard drive no longer ticks at least every five seconds, for instance, and the machine will actually slow to an idle (I watched it do so on the performance monitor), which is okay with me. When my computer is doing nothing, I want it to do nothing, not keep pinging the hard drive doing who-knows-what. At least I know now to not touch NSW again, and to see if I can get a refund for that portion of the purchase. What a waste of resources!