Day 19: Cleaning - Getting a little help from my cats

My Project: 365 Creative Writing Prompts.

Day 19: Cleaning – Write about doing laundry, dishes and other cleaning activities.

Cleaning? They want me to write about cleaning! In all my years, I have never come across anyone who likes to clean. Most, if not all people, do it because they have to, including me. Still, let’s see what I can come up with. Since today is international cat day, let's involve cats in this post.

Making the beds

In our house, the cats dictate when the beds are made. I never make my bed right after getting out of it. I believe that a bed has to air to keep it fresh. Unfortunately, while I shower, get dressed and have breakfast, one, two or even all four cats have taken possession of my bed. And I mean really, look at Charlotte, would you have the heart to disturb her slumber?

Dusting

Once again, the cats have to be taken into account. When I see Mickey sprawled out so elegantly on the coffee table, or Charlotte resting on the cabinet, I just let them be. There’s always time to dust the table and the cabinet later.

Window washing 

If there’s one cleaning task I like to do it’s washing windows. If I didn’t have such a fear of heights, I would have applied at a window washing company in Toronto. Unfortunately, I can’t imagine dangling by a rope from the 82nd, 43rd or even 16th floor.

Anyway, when I wash the windows here at home, I invariably have an audience. Mickey, Charlotte, Gabriel, and Holly sit on the other side of the window and watch the sponge go up and down and from left to right. While Charlotte, Gabriel, and Holly quickly lose interest, Mickey supervises until I’m done. He even points out places where I've missed a spot.

          

Vacuuming

Mickey, Gabriel, and Holly couldn’t care less about the vacuum cleaner, but Charlotte is terrified of the machine. Even though we paid attention to buying one that doesn’t make much noise, it’s still too much for Charlotte. When the vacuum cleaner gets switched on, she goes and hides under my duvet. 

 Meanwhile, Gabriel lies on the cat tree or sit on a chair and sees to it that the work gets done properly.

Dishes

I’m not a fan of doing dishes. Then again, who is? Not sure why I dislike it as I generally like working with water. I get at my most creative when I’m surrounded by water (maybe I should move to Hawaii). Occasionally though, Dieter volunteers and on this occasion (this was several years ago), Mickey was once again there to supervise.

Cooking

When I cook, I generally keep the cats out of the kitchen. When I’m working with boiling water and hot butter, I like to keep them at a safe distance. However, when the potatoes are being peeled, Mick is there to count them.

Now in case you’re wondering why there are no pictures of Holly ... Holly is a lady and stays far away from housework. She prefers sitting in her basket, relaxing on her cushion, lazing in front of the fireplace, or spending time with Dieter while he reads her a story.

Feel free to comment. I’d love to hear from you.

www.connymanero.weebly.com

A scary event

Many years ago, when I still lived at home, Monday was laundry day. Mom had a manual washing machine, struggled with buckets of water and wrestled with wet items to get them into the spinner. By the time she was done, the kitchen was flooded and in addition to laundry she had to mop the floor.

When automatic washing machines became popular she didn’t hesitate, she was going to get one of those wonderful machines. A representative from Primus came to our house and the following week a gleaming new washing machine was delivered and installed.

While the machine was top of the line, mom’s washing skills were not. Having washed manually all her life, an automatic washing machine proved to be a challenge. There were so many buttons and dials. With the machine came a manual of course, but the book being the size of ‘War & Peace’ she didn’t bother to read it. She would learn as she went along.

As such, she accidentally put one of my wool dresses in the machine and must have set the temperature too high because the dress came out several sizes too small for my frame.

Last week history repeated itself. Well, sort of. I’ve been doing laundry with an automatic machine all my life and know about temperature control, but I can’t control the temperature, which is exactly what happened. The pipes in our condo building are to blame.

Even though I had programmed the machine to wash with lukewarm water, every now and then the cold water in the building shuts off and is replaced with hot water. When someone wants to wash his hands, or fancies a drink of cold water, this hot water business is merely an inconvenience, but during laundry time hot water only is a disaster.

Just ask my favorite black jacket. It went into the machine a size 7 and it came out … something fit for a child. I flipped, I absolutely flipped. When I looked at the label it stated ‘100% pure wool’. Yeah well, that explains why it shrunk, wool hates hot water.

I toyed with the idea of holding the building responsible, but if they denied responsibility, how would I prove that it was the building’s faulty pipes? I find this a scary event. This water confusion can happen again and again.

 

I'm baaaaaaack !

Happy New Year to all my readers. I wish you all a pleasant, healthy and fulfilling year.

Did you think I lost interest in my blog? Far from it. I am aware that my last entry dates back to November 2015, but in my defense … I have been very busy writing guides for eBay.

Some of the guides I produced are:

Best tile for shower walls

http://www.ebay.com/gds/Best-Tile-for-Shower-Walls-/10000000206370563/g.html

Best outdoor window cleaners

http://www.ebay.com/gds/Best-Outdoor-Window-Cleaners-/10000000206327831/g.html

Best ice cleats

http://www.ebay.com/gds/Best-Ice-Cleats-/10000000206302225/g.html

These guides are not to be underestimated. There’s extensive research involved, writing the guide, looking for suitable images to accompany the various paragraphs, adding links to make a shopping experience easier, and publishing the guide.

In future, I will share more of these guides as they become available as they might be helpful to some people. I will write the introduction, provide the link and then it’s up to you to click the link, be taken to eBay and hopefully learn something new or be guided in your shopping.

Meet inspector Mickey

Anyone who has a pet, especially a cat or a dog, knows how curious they are with our daily activities.

Noisy activities, such as vacuum cleaning, might keep them at bay, but where it comes to dusting, doing the dishes, or mopping the floors, many of them take a front row seat. And as many pet owners will agree, window washing is their favorite entertainment.

When I filled a bucket with water today, Holly was there, peering in the bucket and looking at me with a face that said … what you doing?

She quickly caught on. As I took the bucket out on the balcony, she planted herself on the windowsill and waited in eager anticipation as to what I was up to.

As the sponge went up and down, and from left to right, so did Holly’s head. As the squeegee moved from the very top to the very bottom of the glass, Holly never took her eyes of this strange contraption.

When the windows were done, Holly took off and inspector Mickey took her place. He padded outside, jumped on the cat tree and had a close look if I had completed the job to his satisfaction.

Are you doubting my statement? See for yourself …

If your cat is not interested in what you’re doing … don’t worry about it, not all cats want to be where the action is.

Just look at Gabriel, he couldn’t care less about window washing and whether or not there are streaks in the glass. He trusts me enough to let me get on with my business while he gets on with his. As long as he gets his beauty sleep, it’s all good.

$2,000 faucets

It started so innocently.  My son saw beautiful faucets in Home Depot that were on special … $59 down from $99.  Unable to resist a bargain he bought them and brought them home.  Little did he know those faucets were about to cost us close to $2,000.

The first problem arose when the new faucets didn’t fit the current vanity table in the bathroom.  Oh well, the table was old and in need of replacing, so why not go for a new cabinet?

Off we went to Canadian Tire to have a look around.  We saw reasonably priced vanity tables, complete with a sink, but … they were rather small and I didn’t particularly like the design.  

So, we went for a separate vanity table.

Of course, now that we had a new table, we really should go for a sink as well, so … off we went to look at sinks.

It didn’t stop with the sink of course, we also bought new lighting and a new mirror.

When the vanity table and the sink got installed in the bathroom yesterday, we hit a snag … the piping didn’t fit.  Since neither of us are qualified plumbers we had to rely on a professional.  $210 later, the pipes were connected.

Everything look great.  The new vanity table, the sink, the lights, the mirror … except, now that everything looked new and improved we really should finish the job and go for a new floor.

Off we went again to Canadian Tire to look at floors.  I liked simple, square white tiles, but could have those.  According to the sales person they were not suitable for a bathroom, because their shiny finish would make them slippery when wet.  To cut a long story short, we found a nice tile that wouldn't have us slipping and sliding all over the place.

Of course, now that we had chosen a floor tile, we needed cement and grout, a bucket to mix the cement in and tools to spread the cement, a tile cutter, spacers and a sponge.

Were we done?  Yes, we had everything.

At the checkout point something caught my eye … a washing machine.  It looked so cute and was so reasonably priced.  We needed it, it was a nice deal, so … what the heck, why not?

So, all in all … if Dieter hadn’t gone for the faucets, we wouldn’t have needed the new vanity table and sink.  If we hadn’t gone for the new table and sink, we wouldn’t have gone for lighting and a mirror.  Neither would we have needed a new floor.  If I hadn’t seen the floor, I wouldn’t have seen the washing machine.

$59 faucets that turned into $2,000 faucets … oh well, the bathroom needed renovating anyway.

How was your weekend?

Upon greeting, people often ask “How are you?”, while on a Monday morning, the question changes to “How was your weekend?”  Do they really want to know, or are they merely being polite? 

Assuming that you care about my health, let me recapture my weekend in a nutshell.

Saturday was laundry and cleaning day.  I popped a Tide capsule in the washing machine, added a load of shirts and towels, poured in fabric softener and pressed the “ON” button.  Nothing happened.  I pressed the “ON” button again.  I jabbed at it a few times more but the machine stayed stubbornly quiet.

"Stupid thing, what's the matter with you?" I asked.

No response, which is was a good thing because if the machine had spoken I would have run for the hills.

And then I noticed it ... the door wasn't closed.  Once I pressed that firmly into place, a gently whoosh of water indicated that the washing cycle had started.

While the washing machine did its thing, I was going to do some vacuuming.  A task not to be underestimated, because the vacuum cleaner weighs a ton.  It almost requires a trained bodybuilder to move it from here to there.

I was halfway through sucking dirt from the carpet - all the while swinging to the beat of Jennifer Lopez - when the machine suddenly stopped.  Hold on Jennifer, we seem to have technical difficulties.

I check the "ON" button, I checked the bristles, I peered in the dirt container ... everything seemed to be in order.  So what was the matter with this thing?  Ah, the electrical cord had come unplugged.  That ought to do it.

When everything was clean and tidy I fired up my laptop for some writing.  32 emails awaited me.

Junk, junk, more junk, a message from the UK informing me that my email account had won 32 million Euros, a blog entry about how to be a better writer (must get to that later) and ... ah, a message from a friend who was kind enough to have a look at chapters 1, 2 and 3 of a new story.

I do say "Chapters 1, 2 and 3" because the story held six chapters at the time, but chapters 4, 5 and 6 were not quite approved yet.

After I read the edited chapters - much better this time around - I did a "Save As" and clicked the file name.  OMG !!! too late I realized that I had just saved over the entire document and chapter 4, 5 and 6 were now gone.  Stupid, stupid, STUPID!!!  All that work for nothing.

Finally Sunday night arrived.  This unfortunate weekend was almost over.

When it got a little chilly, I got up and closed the balcony door.  Don't ask me what I did, because I still can't get my mind around it, but in the process I managed to squash two of my fingers.  A scream of pain, followed by holding of the damaged fingers.  And damaged they were.  Not only were the cuticles on both fingers bleeding, they rapidly began to swell to the extent that the knuckles disappeared.

As you can see though, no real damage was done as I can still type.

How was my weekend?  Well, let's just say I've had better.