R.I.P. Gimpy Lamp

Last night, after arriving home at around 10:45 PM , Mary Kate and I thought it would be a brilliant idea to clean the entire apartment before we started working on our finals. Which, for me, makes no difference, since I work most productively in the library (as you can tell...here I am with half a page written of a 10 page essay and I decided that I need something stimulating right now), but for Mary Kate, it makes a huge difference.

Our working styles are significantly different. While we both crave quiet, she craves organization as well. Me, on the other hand...well, I like organization, but if it's not there sometimes, then I'm not going to fret too much about it initially. This lead to a rather unfortunate situation in which for a while I was doing most of my reading in a certain chair in one corner. Then it came upon me to work at the end end of the room in a different chair on a different subject, which meant that my art history stuff was in one corner while my Spanish plays was in another, and eventually my Prints and Drawings stuff was just everywhere. During this time, ten years was taken off Mary Kate's life, and she regularly went into her room to have some alone time and scream as loudly as she could into pillows.

Sorry Mary Kate.

But anyway, at 10:45 PM, it seemed like a good idea to clean. Which, I hate to confess, our apartment really needed. Not the toilet (I still clean that) or the kitchen, it was just...everything else. It needed some good old fashioned down-on-your-hands-and-knees-Cinderella-scrubbing, which it got, and the common areas were finished around 12:10 AM. I will not even START my bedroom until next week.

At around 12:22 AM, I got the idea to make some buttermilk biscuits, which requires a rolling pin. And buttermilk. The former which I thought we had, the latter which I knew we had.

However, when it came time to start rolling, I could not find the pin. Which led to this:



The quartering of The Lamp.

The Lamp has been around since first year. I actually don't remember using him at all, but what I remember is knocking him over when I tipped over our couch last year. I don't care to get into the details of how I tipped over the couch, but if you must know, I was recreating gymnast Carly Patterson's winning moves from the 2004 Athens Olympic Games.

Since that time, the lamp has never been the same. It's protested every time we've tried to turn it on, and recently it hasn't even wanted to stand up straight. So, in one last desperate attempt to make The Lamp useful, I cut him apart and used his belly midsection as a rolling pin.

Right after I put my astonishingly thin biscuits into the oven, I found my rolling pin hanging out on a rank in plain view, so The Lamp was actually sacrificed needlessly. And my biscuits are way too thin. They are sort of like crackers, actually.

Before the end of the year, I plan on figuring out alternate uses for every single article of furniture in our apartment, and I can hardly wait to see the look on Mary Kate's face when I decide that the fireplace will make a good pantry, our table can double as my bed, her desk can be used as an ironing board, our bookshelves are places to put silverware as well as crumpled up pieces of paper and books, and every inch of ground can be used as a floured rolling/cutting board. And this time, I will not be cleaning up anything.