House mousing

When I heard the term “house mousing” for the first time, I immediately thought that that meant trying to catch mice in the buildings to keep them off food and other things. But then I realized that here at the Pole, there is no other life form present than humans and bacteria. Where would the mice come from? And where would they live? And they could by far not grow enough fur to survive here…

I then figured out that the term “house mousing” actually refers to community janitorial duties. I found a sticker at the inside of my room door that says that the person living in that particular room is responsible to clean the bathrooms of this wing and this level on Fridays. Every day somebody else living in our wing has that duty, and every day not just one person, but several are assigned.

So today was my bathroom cleaning duty day. I had, of course, never done that before. Well, I have cleaned bathrooms before, but not here on station. And unfortunately I was the only woman assigned for the house mousing duty today, so the whole women’s bathroom was my playing field. Luckily there were cleaning instructions posted on the bathroom wall, with what to do and what cleaning supply to use. Nevertheless, it was kind of tricky to figure out which one of the three spray bottles contained “Clean green”, which one “Windex”, and which one “Bleach”.

Well, I managed, and at least I had a clean shower stall for my after-erging shower then…