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By now, you are familiar with the bad boy side of Eric Johnson, your editor.

The James Dean of Journalism

The Marlon Brando of Media

The … you know, it is really hard to find comparisons between bad boys and journalism. Maybe that says something about this profession.

At any rate you are aware, I guess, of that side of me, but I’m not here today to talk about career exploits like hanging precariously out of a helicopter to take a picture of a bean bag drop. Walking atop a windtower. Going into a burning building with the fire department.

All of these are noteworthy, but for the sake of your blood pressure I’m going to talk about window cleaning.

Probably not as exciting as wind through the hair on top of said windtower, but to be completely candid … I have nothing else this week. It’s been a little slow recently unless we talk about my first attempt ever at making kimchi with purple cabbage.

If I have anybody of a Korean background among my 52 readers, my apologies for what inevitably is an affront to your culinary history.

At any rate, there is a time and a place for the mundane portions of our life and seeing that I went through that with the washing of windows on Saturday, then I’m going to make you read about it.

Of course, you could always put the paper down or scroll past this article in your morning reading, but I kind of hope you stick around.

Otherwise I’ve wasted a hard-put effort of 10 minutes writing this.

Carl Bernstein I’m not.

Aside from the general requirements of even the most minor of home maintenance, I decided the time was right to clean the windows based on two things — first, I was tired of seeing the world through the grunge-tinged film that coated our big picture window and secondly, I couldn’t remember the last time I washed window.

An indictment of my laziness I’m sure.

Speaking toward the first point, I was sitting in the living room at around 2:30 a.m., on night productively not sleeping and watching once again as the world slowly and went by my window. As I’ve spoken about before, the search light that is the security light outside of IJ Holton Intermediate School was showing loud and clear that my windows were indeed, gross.

I believe that’s a professional description, but you would have to ask somebody who actually washes windows for a living to confirm that.

Saturday morning rolled about and I finally followed with said rolling out of bed. I did some chores around the house before heading to Runnings to pick up a squeegee with a sponge on it so I could thoroughly do the job.

If I’m to be perfectly honest, I probably spent far too much time checking one squeegee against another, but I spent my hard-earned $8 and came home to prep the soapy water for my 30 minutes of window washing.

Still with me? I wasn’t sure. You’ve yawned a couple times now and I don’t want to lose you.

We don’t have a lot of windows in the house and in full disclosure, laziness still got the best of me in that I avoided the upstairs windows for the time being.

Besides, I had an activity that was a lot more fun waiting for me in the house. Tasting a batch of hard cider that needed to be re-racked. Remind me to tell you about that sometime because I used real apples to make it this time.

It’s only slightly more exciting than this tale.

In short, it didn’t take me very long to wrap up our windows, but somehow I was left more embarrassed than when I discovered how dirty the windows were in the first place.

Sitting down for a bit of lunch afterwards allowed me the chance to look out the clear glass and discover the world, and much like myself is fairly colorful and not just coated with a brownish-gray film.

Just how bad and lazy am I that there would be this much difference between clean and dirty?

Don’t answer that. I’ve just come to learn more about myself that I really wanted to know and I really don’t need an honest appraisal of my life at the moment.