Thursday, October 24, 2013

The Owl Gets Mean

We have a new and maybe not entirely welcome variation on The Owl Game. This one can be played day or night and involves Cubby the great owl hunter swooping down on a hapless lemming.

You'll never guess who the lemming is in this game.

Oh wait. You did guess Charlie? How clever of you. And how unfortunate for Charlie.

This is why if you were present in my house at 6:30 this morning, you would have heard me yelling across the downstairs, "Charlie is not a lemming! Knock it off!" as Charlie Lemming got knocked off his feet for the fifth time.

We have so much fun around here; you have no idea.

Monday, October 21, 2013

A.P.D.--The Real Housekeepers of Wherever Edition

The Great Mildew Eradication continues apace. I am currently working my way around the downstairs bedroom, which is always horribly damp and even in a relatively dry summer requires some serious attention. Since this was not a dry summer--at all--serious is an understatement.

Gross.

This room was last very throroughly cleaned last summer. Not that you could tell based on its current condition. Which made me consider as I was scrubbing: How often would it need to be really thoroughly cleaned to be acceptable?

When I say "thoroughly," I mean in the sense of a good old-fashioned spring cleaning: All furniture moved and cleaned, all surfaces--walls, baseboards, window frames, floors--scrubbed with a scrubby sponge and a tub of water and wood cleaner. By hand. Then dried with a cloth. All curtains and other fabrics washed if possible. Everything.

It takes me about eight hours of this kind of cleaning to completely clean one room in my house. That's a full work day (which of course I do not actually have, so I have to do it over several naptimes). I have eight rooms just downstairs. Another eleven rooms upstairs. The scale of it is literally impossible for me.

That's why even the most-used rooms only get this thorough cleaning once a year. If I'm lucky.

But enough about me. I'm extremely curious about your experiences with this.

So, my lovelies, how often do you do a balls-out, no-holds-barred scrubbing of your house? And how long does it take you to get just one room really, really clean?

Sunday, October 20, 2013

Great Minds

A. noted a couple of days ago that soon we're going to have a stretch of cool days with nights at or just below freezing. "You know what this means," he said.

Yes, I thought. I do know what this means. It means I need to get the basil bushes whacked down and make a second batch of pesto. It means I should cut the rest of the never-ending squash off the plants and put them up on the stone wall to cure. It means I should get the garlic planted.

"It means we can start slaughtering lambs," he continued.

Oh. Not what I was expecting him to say.

But that pretty much sums up the differences between us: I think of the vegetable garden; A. thinks of meat.