What is this productivity you speak of?

Dave worked an all-night/all-day fashion week gig last night to this evening, and my goal was to get to bed at a reasonable hour and then get our apartment back into some sort of order. I didn't do very well...

We still have this sort of permadirt left from when our landlord had the new windows installed.  The old windows were original to the building - impossible to properly clean and essentially nonexistent in the insulation department. When it got cold outside I could sit at my desk and feel equal parts heat from the radiator and cold from the windows! Our landlord, as the oil prices get higher and higher, has grown more and more agitated about the heating costs (one of the best things about NYC is that most apartment rentals include heat, so if the apartment isn't energy efficient in that regard, the right person is footing the bill for it) and we've pointed to the terrible windows several times, not expecting any response.

So we're pretty darn thrilled to have them, but getting the work completed was like pulling teeth. Poor Dave was stuck with doing that dental duty as well, as I was busy that week. It was a pretty neat thing to watch, but getting them to clean up afterwards was just a hopeless task. What had been billed as a one day project turned into nearly a week of pestering the contractor and moving all our stuff around. They literally ripped the old windows out of their seat in the wall and then mounted the new ones in their place, which created a great deal of plastery white chips everywhere and powdery dirt that got into everything. They patched everything back up, but didn't do a terribly neat job of it, which left yet more dust and grime.

Today I think I may have finally gotten the best part of it out of our bedroom, which is great, but the spare room has been on a messy downward spiral since the construction, with the bicycles everywhere (there are only two of them, but it feels like they're everywhere), bunny stuff spilling out of the closet and piles of crap on the futon. There are empty boxes living next to my desk, piles of who knows what all over Dave's desk and every flat surface is covered. I don't even know what's at the bottom of some of these piles! I was really hoping to get that dealt with today, and all I seem to have accomplished is the area around Dave's (much neater) desk. I'm actually quite proud of that 5 foot square, and I did get the laundry all done!

Sadly, my cleaning streak ended when I turned on the Sox game, and now here I am, wasting time talking about the cleaning I'm not doing.  I did finally come up with an excuse for posting some of these window pictures though!