My sister has always been a messy person. The only reason she cleaned house when she was a teenager was because our mother forced her to for allowance, and weed didn’t come free, even back then. And when I was little, our house was usually spotless. But when Jennifer moved out and got her own home(s) (the girl has moved more times than I’ve had birthdays), her true colors began to show. And they were messy, dirty, smelly colors, believe me.

I knew I’d have to clean the upstairs and help clean the main part of the house when I came home for the summer. But the extent of filth which Jennifer will allow to build up in certain parts of the house absolutely baffles me. I don’t just mean that she leaves dirty clothes and newspapers and empty cans around the house. It is DIRTY with DUST AND GRIME AND BUGS. Yes, BUGS.

As an example, allow me to describe the upstairs bathroom when I first got home. The floor wasn’t too dirty… except it was sticky around the toilet from where it had apparently overflowed several weeks ago, and the huge blood stain from when we had a deathly ill beagle confined in the bathroom was still there. The mirror was covered in water spots. The sink was sticky, but not too bad. There were dirty, hard-crusted towels surrounding the toilet and hanging from the hand towel rack - presumably from when the toilet overflowed. The bathtub was full of COBWEBS and SPIDERS and DEAD CRICKETS. I am so not joking.

But that’s not the worst part. When I opened the toilet, I nearly had a heart attack. They’d told me it was broken and that Roger needed to get the water out before it could be fixed (even though, as I said, this apparently happened weeks ago). When I opened the toilet, the first thing I noticed was the green mold on the front of the white cushion seat. I don’t mean a little spot either. When I opened it all the way, well, let me give you an image. You know in Dogma when the shit monster comes out of the toilet at the bar? This kind of looked like that was about to happen. The bowl was filled to the brim with moldy brown water with some sort of brown puffy substance in it. I can’t say with certainty that it was actually shit though. And the mold was also covering the underside of the seat’s lid.

It was all I could do not to vomit. I told them I would clean the bathroom, but I refused to touch that toilet. When Roger finally went to “fix” it, it turns out that all he did was flush it, it went down, there was no leak from the pipes as originally thought. So all that disgusting stuff in the bowl was sitting there for weeks, growing mold, for no apparent reason other than their laziness.

And that blood stain on the floor? Jennifer said she’d gotten on her hands and knees with bleach and a brush and couldn’t get it up. I put on a rubber glove, grabbed a sponge and some Spray Power, and got it completely off with two passes. You can’t tell there was a two-year-old stain there. (Yes, it was on that floor for two years.) Then I cleaned the rest of the bathroom. In all the time it’s been sitting there, filthy and inviting to various undesirable diseases, in six hours I got it to look like this:

I never thought I was overly clean or OCD until I lived with Jennifer. I’m fucking Danny Tanner compared to her. I like my things to be organized, uncluttered, and occasionally NOT dusty. The crazy part is that she doesn’t have a real job - her job was to be the “housewife” and keep this place clean while everyone else worked and went to school. Looks like she’s been enjoying her role quite well.

Now, I’ll just leave you with a photo of what I saw growing out of the window when I opened the door to the privacy stairwell.

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