It’s Parent Weekend, or your birthday, or just a Thursday night and you’re craving a free meal a la parentals. Either way, your parents are coming to campus and that means one thing and one thing only: it’s time to clean.

It’s not like your place is dirty – at least by your standards – but something about having mom and dad sit on that couch (where your roommate hooked up last night and – oh! – her bra is stuffed between the cushions) is just not right.
You don’t need your parents seeing the cans from last night’s impromptu party, or the empty Doritos bags littering your
bedroom floor.

You run home from class/work and get moving on the deep clean. You start with your bedroom. You fold all of the clothes that have been piled on your floor for three weeks and put them away.  After you make your bed, you decide some vacuuming is in order. Good idea, too, as you find some less than parent-friendly goodies (your bowl or some empty condom wrappers, perhaps?) under the bed. You remove the dirty dishes (AKA the cereal bowl from last week filled with congealed milk) from your desk and replace them with books and binders. Read More »

College pet peeve #582. We are required to move out of the dorms 24 hours after our last final. Theoretically, you should be spending your last week or two studying. Not packing. And what if you finish exams mid-week and your ‘rents can’t drive up to haul your stuff home because, you know, they have jobs?

Packing at the end of the semester is a bitch. But, on the bright side, it’s still better than the cleaning that comes after packing. Make your life easier by getting a head start on moving out for the summer, by following these simple suggestions!

1. Clean up after yourself.

I am guilty of letting things slide when I’m stressed. I procrastinate on everything from vacuuming to bringing the 57 empties from last night’s dorm party to the recycling bin. However, if you take five seconds (okay, five minutes, tops) out of your day to clean up the little things, you won’t have so much clutter-slash-junk-slash-trash to wade through when you’re trying to round up the stuff you actually want to keep. Read More »

Your 10 page paper on the complete works of Shakespeare is due in less than a week. You vowed to spend all of Sunday at the library working on it, but an impromptu beer pong tournament broke out at your house on Saturday night and you were so busy eating Oreo Cakesters and chugging Vitaminwater that the entire day passed you by. Now it’s crunch time and you have no choice but to bang it out.

You decide not to waste any time, so you skip the long walk to the library and work at home. You tell your roommates not to bother you, lock the door to your room and settle in for some serious paper writing.

Only your desk is really messy. You can’t focus when you don’t even have space to spread out your books. So you clean it. Twenty minutes and a garbage can full of papers later, you decide to take out the trash. But before you do that, you might as well make sure there isn’t anything else that needs to be thrown away. You begin to clean your room. Once it is clean, you tell yourself, you will be able to focus. Read More »

[I used to think I knew everything...until I found myself stranded in the middle of adulthood with no map and no one to guide me when I got lost. I have learned a lot since then - from how to balance a checkbook to how to sew on a button - and will share my wisdom with you. Every Monday I will be back to teach you how to do something useful, even if it also happens to be completely random. Because, hey, you never know when you just might need to know how to change a tire...or mix a perfect martini.]

It happens—you’re out to dinner (most likely with someone you find attractive), you order some sweet-potato fries, and suddenly the glob of grease that was on its way to your mouth is blossoming all over your new white sweater/ blouse/ pants/ tank/ beautiful item of clothing. You might have to keep that glob around for the night (and swear to god that it is the only thing attractive boy is looking at), but you can get it out. Yes, even without mom’s help.

The first rule of thumb for getting rid of (embarassing) grease stains is more of a don’t than a do: don’t toss that sucker in the laundry basket when you get home and “deal with it later.” Detergent and water will NOT remove grease stains, so you’re going to have to get tough.

Now onto the do…

Perhaps the easiest thing to try is a stain-removal spray. You can find them in any store right by the detergents, and if you spray them on stains pre-wash and rub them in, they’re supposed to take any spots right out. I say “supposed to” because my spray is a little full of itself and doesn’t work quite as advertised.

If that doesn’t work, this page will totally bail you out. This person has compiled dozens of tips featuring numerous household items that will likely be able to save you in a pinch.

Most successful for me have been the following: Read More »

We’ve talked about Craigslist countless times before. It’s glorious and hilarious and you can buy chairs or sell your cat. However, after a little chat with our hormonal Coed office buddies, we realized that there was an untapped ocean of entertainment on CL known as Casual Encounters. We knew all about Missed Connections (and may have looked to see, from time to time, if anyone had MC’ed us…which they never did), but had always assumed that the Casual Encounters section of Cragislist was full of skeevy people and penis pics.

So yeah, it’s full of skeevy people and ‘peen pics, but it’s also full of the strange and the weird and the desperate. How entertaining!

PS: We changed the titles and photos to fit our liking (and keep nasty ‘peen pics off our site). It’s better this way. Trust us. Read More »

There are a lot of traditional expectations of women to which I don’t match up with smoothly. For the most part, I don’t even care to bother meeting up to these expectations. Except for this one thing:

I wish I could be cleaner.

I don’t have a neat-freak bone anywhere in my body. I’m not convinced that I even want a neat-freak bone. But when I walk into some friends’ homes and everything is immaculately clean…it makes me wonder why I too can’t prioritize cleaning.

In order for me to clean, I really need to be expecting guests. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not DIRTY. I don’t leave food out, I do the dishes, take out the trash, blah blah. Oh, and I bathe. But I’m A-OK with leaving my shoes, jackets, purses, etc. all over the living room and I don’t mind if my roomies do, either. I don’t care if there’s makeup all over the counter and the bathroom floors aren’t spotless. Did I miss a memo somewhere?

It doesn’t even ‘run’ in my family. My family is actually very neat and they often argued with me over being somewhat of a slob growing up. I guess I just can’t see why cleaning is more important than sitting on the couch.

It’s not something I necessarily learned from my friends, either. In fact, my friends are kind of the people who make pay attention to the fact that I’m not like them. Take my good friend, Cara, for example. She mops her floors incessantly. When we get into her place from spending the evening out she literally – no f*cking joke – mops the floor. Am I crazy for thinking this is crazy? Read More »

Last time, I went room by room and identified what needed to be done to organize and make most efficient use of the space in my small house. School is starting again in a month and I wanted to have everything in its place and better systems for some of my everyday activities.

I started in the office, concentrating in the computer area. College seems to bring with it numerous credit card offers and bills and notifications that always seem to be tucked in various places on the desk, asking to be thrown away or forgotten. So I got very a simple, $3 silver mail sorter that went nicely with our translucent blue desk (who says you can’t be functional and stylish?.) There are slots for outgoing mail, my mail and my boyfriend’s. Using this simple system, we have been able to keep track of our mail much better. Now I can pay my bills on time and not have mini heart attacks when I can’t find that one, really important piece of mail.

If you are anything like me, disorganization is not simply limited to your desk. No maam; it extends also to planner and mind. It’s difficult to remember due dates in the midst of piles of homework, so I got a small dry erase board from a dollar store and stuck it to the nearest wall with all the due dates for our monthly payments. It’s not written down and forgotten about in some small place in my planner or on a note that will get lost; it’s in a place that I can’t help but look at. Read More »

Last time, I looked up some great websites for ideas on how to help me de-clutter and reorganize my fairly cluttered and unorganized home. Since then, I’ve been using my internet resources and going room by room to identify problem areas and reorganize things to make more efficient use of space and less complicated day by day living.

I started in the room that gave me the most problems, the office. But, as I realized when I started to go to work in this room, doing anything drastic here would be fairly fruitless. It serves a very practical purpose of housing all the things that we have no place for elsewhere and serves as my boyfriend’s dressing room for work. What I’m saying is, most of the stuff in here is his to do with as he pleases.

I’m concentrating on the computer area, where I am going to create a more efficient filing system, a better bill paying system, a better storage system for desk supplies and for old school work.

My bedroom is small as it is, made more so by the volume of things we have in it. My main objective in this room is to create more space, organize my shoes and accessories, create a tidier laundry system, and find a way to store my pants in my ridiculously small closet. Read More »

I’ve decided that to keep my budget under $100, I’m going to use internet resources and not buy all the books I really want to buy. Like this one. and this one.

But I digress. The first website I checked our was Flylady, which I’d heard a lot of good things about and at first glance seems frightening comprehensive. Seriously, there is so much on this site that I’m not really sure where to start. I find a ‘Beginner’s Babysteps” section and note that they mention something about sending you 15-20 emails a day. Yeah, I don’t think so.

I get the impression this website is more for people who need their hand held–That’s not me, but maybe it would work for you. Flylady does give me the idea of sectioning my house into “zones” and concentrating there. She does have some good tips, though. I would start in her site index and skip around.

Next I try organized home and it seems a lot more user friendly. It puts many of its tips into list form, which is good for me because I read “list” fluently. I also like it because it gives you tips not only to help you get organized in the first place, but to maintain your level of organization.

I was hesitant to look at Martha Stewart’s website; I’ve always kind of thought that her ideas were interesting, but not always especially practical or doable on a budget or my kindergartner’s level of organization skills. I can admit it, I was wrong. Read More »

Finals were rough this year. Not that they are ever especially fun, but for some reason I had an inordinately difficult time sitting down at my desk and forcing myself to write. And once I did, I would realize that I didn’t have the right book in the right place and I couldn’t find these notes or those notes and I could hardly type with the mountain of work piling up, threatening to topple over onto my keyboard at any moment.

I found myself in that predicament because I tend to get unorganized when I have a lot of stuff to do. Dangerously so. Which is bad, because I have a hard time concentrating when things need to be straightened, or cleaned, or filed away. I can’t work unless my workspace is clean and everything I need is at hand.

And so, I thought that I would take the first weeks of the summer before I start classes in July and totally reorganize and idiot-proof my office, and, as massive an undertaking as it will be, my entire home. Read More »