Days and Nights at Blackrock

Days filled with boys wielding sticks, dogs chewing on moldy bones, and a very dead red squirrel that got caught by the tail on a ripped-up gutter drain and was hanging upside down inside the drain. It had to be hauled out ever so carefully by the tail so it didn't fall right apart and stay in the drain forever.

That last one was way gross. I got to do the rodent removal, since I was the one who spied the little tuft of fur sticking out of the hole. I'm glad we have one less squirrel on the property, but it was a bad way to go for the squirrel. Not so pleasant for the clean-up crew, either.

Nights filled with . . . wait, am I sleeping? What a novel thing, to sleep at night! Except for that one night when the travel alarm clock went off at 2:58 a.m. because Charlie had found it somewhere and was pressing all the buttons and then obediently put it back in my room where I told him it was supposed to be. I nearly had a heart attack when the thing started beeping, but at least it didn't wake Jack up in the next room.

Today is Cubby's last day of school. Next week is Charlie's. We'll shortly have even more of the boys with sticks around to entertain us.

Perhaps "entertain" was not the best word choice.

Happy Friday, my lovelies! Go forth and be merry!

A.P.D.--Let's Talk Bathrooms

I just finished scrubbing my bathroom with a scrub brush. I only did about half of it--the wall behind the toilet and about 2/3 of the wretched shower tiles, which are the two most mildewed areas always--because it took 45 minutes of intense scrubbing and that was as much as my hands and wrists could do without giving out. An hour and a half of such labors would render me crippled for life.

I keep thinking maybe my problem is that I just don't do it frequently enough. But then I also think that I just can't imagine wiping down every surface of my bathroom every single day, which I think is what I would need to do to keep the mildew from taking over.

Bathrooms in old stone houses are mildew-making factories. Just FYI, if you're on the market for an old stone house.

So please tell me, my lovelies: If your bathroom is mildew-free, how in the hell do you keep it that way? Do you clean it every day? Do you scrub it hard every week? Am I just lazy, or do I really have the most mildew-prone bathroom in the whole country?*

* Don't answer that last one, because it may be a combination of the two and, well, I kind of know I'm not winning any awards for zealous housekeeping. But who wants to scrub walls when there are potatoes to be hilled and tomatoes to be staked?