En guarde!

War hath been waged here in Krabby Land. It's a vicious, exhausting life or death fight. The enemy is relentless and seems to come back no matter what tactics are used against it.

The enemy is dust & mold.

You see I have terrible allergies. I mean really really bad allergies. All last semester I kept getting sick. Towards the end of the semester it got worse. I couldn't seem to shake what I believed was a perpetual cold. I tried everything. I took over-the-counter cold medicine, drank gallons of orange juice, took Emergen-C and AirBorne, gargled with warm salt water, downed green tea with honey, upped my consumption of berries (which I hate) and even tried yoga that supposedly fights colds. Nothing worked.

While back in the Land of the Peaches I wasn't sick at all. Not even a little sniffle, which was impressive given that I spent a lot of time around our Christmas tree. Did I mention that I'm mildly allergic to Christmas trees? Cause I am. But it wasn't quite enough to send me over the edge. I spent 3-4 weeks blissfully healthy.

Then I returned to Krabby Land. And that perpetual cold? It was waiting for me.

So I realized that my cold probably wasn't actually a cold. It was probably allergies.  So today after coming home from class I waged war.

Now I'm a cleanly person. I scrub & dust & vacuum weekly. But I went all out this time, even going so far as to stack old casebooks on my the top step of step stool in order to dust my ceiling fan. Disclaimer: don't try that one at home. It's incredibly stupid & purely a miracle that I wasn't injured in the process. I moved my big plant into my kitchen and off the carpeting. I even washed my pillows. They aren't quite dry yet but they are sitting on my drying rack in my bathtub with a fan on them.

Now after 4 hours of relentless dusting and scrubbing, my apartment is sparkling. In an attempt to keep things from getting damp, I killed my heat, turned on my (sparkly clean) fan and am relying on a small space heater instead. It is snowing heavily outside right now. I'm also looking into a

So now the war has intensified. I will keep my apartment neat and clean. I will dust twice weekly now. And I will win.

"I get strangely obsessed about the cleanliness of my house."

Utada Hikaru