Last night before bed, I had thought up this long, well-developed entry about the spiritual significance of nomadic dairy cows, but like most other things, it was wiped out by sleep, and this morning I woke up thinking only that waking up was the last thing I wanted to do.

We've been working on the new house all week, 2-3 hours a night, and so far, in a week we've managed to scrub clean the kitchen, the dining room and half of the living room. I blame the kitchen cabinets myself, with all their angles and shelves and doors and hinges. We'll get over there about 7:30 armed with rags and bleach and industrial-strength cleaner (yes, both of those two together) and mops and sponges and goggles and gloves, and set about scrubbing anything that will stay still long enough.

The previous owner had a tiny clock-radio type cassette player mounted under one of the kitchen cabinets, which she graciously left in place, and we generally listen to the BBC World News. When one or the other of us gets to the point where we want to stick our heads in the oven, we'll pop in a tape, proving once and for all that I was right about keeping those things around. They did turn out to be useful after all. In order for both of us to hear anything above the sounds of furious scrubbing, we turn it up pretty loud. Most of the tapes are from the early 90s when, as it turns out, both of us were into either goth, punk, Monty Python or all of the above. Sometimes I wonder if the music's too loud, and if our older, mature neighbors would rather not be hearing parts of the Rocky Horror Picture Show at 11 o'clock at night. But owning a house is all about not having to turn the music down and besides, I suspect they all have their own copies.

In order to help dispel all the smoke, we had been leaving all the windows and the back screen door open. It's helping a little bit, but the main result has been that you can now smell smoke about 10 feet before the front door. Oh, and someone apparently came through the house while we were gone. Tuesday night we came in to find the radio blaring on a station neither of us would listen to, and various doors that had been shut were wide open and vice versa. Little things like that that just creeped me the fuck out. Maybe it was the former owner, but somehow I don't picture her as a hip-hop fan. So now we close and lock all the ground floor doors and windows.

I don't think either of us really grasped the significance of 30 years of smoke until we washed the living room doors last night. No Virginia, the door is not melting, that's all nicotine! Even with plain water, the sponge would come away black in places, and the stain on those doors is not actually cherry, as had been previously thought. It's more of a light maple. People who smoke should do time cleaning up a house where smokers have lived. See all that brown juice pooling on the carpet? That's in your lungs! Hello!

We figure that in another week or so, we should be done cleaning and at least half way done priming and sealing, which means that we will then no longer be able to put off picking wall colors. It's been an uphill battle. We're both moderately color-impaired (one person wears all black, the other person wears only "Blandland" as his family calls it) and have strong feelings about the issues involved, so the conversations have been interesting and generally should involve more alcohol. Seeing as how everything has to be recovered in a thick layer of latex, we have a lot of alcohol in our future. Feel free to weigh in about how hard a bright orange kitchen would rock here.

The title of this entry comes from Sufjan Stevens' new album, Illinois. Stevens is releasing an album for all 50 states. Michigan was first, and Illinois is shortly to be released, and it features such fabulous track titles as:

• A Short Reprise for Mary Todd, Who Went Insane, But For Good Reasons
• Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland IL
• They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back From the Dead!! Ahhhhh!
• Come on! Feel the Illinoise!

Teaching the Indie Kids How to Dance Again ("Feet are for Moving, Not for Staring at") has that last track up on their site right now, and it is stunning and brilliant and really will make the indie kids dance. It may even affect the goths. You just never know. I am having to try very hard not to listen to it on endless repeat.

You can order copies of Michigan here.