Cleanup on Aisle 2

So, as Eric will readily share with you, I have a few OCD traits. Like, perhaps, more than a few. I need to have things neat and clean. I hate dust (which is an issue, living in Colorado, where it's dry and the wind blows incessantly.) I need things to be neat, clean, and if a picture is crooked, no matter where I am, I have to straighten it, even if that place is the doctor's office. Or work. Or the grocery store.

What keeps me from diagnosis however, is my car.

My car is a mess.

I don't clean it out. I rarely run it through the car wash. This is one of the few places where Eric and I have nearly completely switched roles. He fervently believes in some sort of weird car karma, where, if you wash your vehicle regularly, it will last longer. He buys stuff like "tire wet" and special spray for interior car surfaces. On the other hand, in the words of the immortal Rhett Butler, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a d@mn." It is most assuredly function over form for me with cars. I have been known to eat breakfast while driving to work (ok, now that I live close to work, I eat breakfast at my desk), not caring if the Greek yogurt got on the steering wheel. I toss dirty running shoes and hiking boots into the passenger foot well without a care for the mud on the bottoms. I avoid vacuuming like the thing like it could give me a communicable disease.

I don't believe anything resembling a cleaning tool has made it to the inside of my car since we moved out of the apartment, and I tossed the house vacuum in the backseat for transport.

So you can imagine what shape my car has been in. It has slowly grown in consciousness for me, that really, I should do something about this. I've let that thought fester for a while (read: months), and finally, on Sunday, talked myself into doing something about it.

In the interim, I've dusted every surface in the house, washed the kitchen floor, cleaned the counter tops, scrubbed toilets, weeded the xeriscape, and even trimmed the bushes in the front yard. Like I said, I'm fastidious about anything and everything else.

So, I got out the shop vac, the shop towels, the interior spray and the glass cleaner, and got to work.

Despite my characterization, I don't really think that I keep "that" much stuff in my car. However, in cleaning out the map pockets, I found two Better Homes and Gardens magazines from 2009, a National Park Service brochure for Fort Union (where IS that, anyway?), an entire folder FULL of CISM brochures (a team I haven't been on since I left Indiana), a roll of Smarties, one spoon, a map of Indiana and one of Breckenridge (ok, I KNOW the car has never been there!) In the backseat were two wayward snow scrapers, an atlas that had found its way out of its designated pocket behind the passenger seat, three plastic cups (new, wrapped in cellophane), my yoga mat (don't even ASK the last time I took a class - before all this back stuff started), a pop can, a $5 bill, and 32 cents. And Jimmy Hoffa's body, which turns out to be the final insult to him since I drive a Honda.

I vacuumed it all. I threw stuff away. I put other stuff in its rightful place. I loaded up an envelope and sent the brochures back to my old team in Indiana (Jim, you have a package in the mail. Cheers.) I wiped down all the surfaces with the interior cleaner. I got rid of the faint film on the inside of the windshield with glass cleaner and newspaper. I chiseled out the granola gook stuck to the drink holder.

And while the glue from the temp tag that was stuck on the rear window is still there from when I bought the car (in, what? 2010? 2009?) because I refuse to take peanut butter to it, I will tell you: my car is now clean.

I like it. It makes my OCD feel good. I should do this more often... uh, oh... I can feel it setting in already...

Frankly, my dear, I don't give a d@mn.