Saturday Means Cleaning Day!

Ready for cleaning in my cleaning apron with my shmop.

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Today is Saturday and that means it's cleaning day. From the time I was very young Saturday was the day we had to clean our rooms and each one of us had another cleaning chore besides. Mom had a Caper Chart and our jobs changed every week. The most hated jobs for Lynn and I were Sweeping and Dusting. I preferred dusting over sweeping and so did Lynn. We were always trying to trade jobs and Lynn, being the oldest usually got her way! ( I could do a whole blog on being the middle child and may do it one of these days.) I also remember cleaning the upstairs bathroom when we got older. It had one of those old fashioned white and black true tile floors with the little white hexagon tiles. We had to get on our hands and knees and scrub that puppy every Saturday! It was not a fun chore.

(Just looked out the window and Minky is up in the bird feed box this morning!)



Here's Minky, again!

When we were in high school we had a cleaning lady named Eliza. She was a large woman (about 250#) and was full of great philosophical comments. We loved her. I can remember some of her comments. One time Tip was barefoot in the house and she exclaimed, "you must be a January baby! Look at those long toes!" And he is one! Another time on a hot summer day she said, " It's so hot today, the Presbyterians are running down my back!". There was a dead oppossom in the neighbor's yard,one time, and she got her shopping bag and put it in it and took it home on the bus to cook for dinner. She was so grateful and talked about what a good meal that was for a long time! I'm not sure how great a cleaning lady she was, but she sure was entertaining!

After I got my first teaching job at North Park, I used some of my money to hire Wilma to clean our house once a week. She was good and got us really organized. Every week we had a "Wilma alert" and everyone was supposed to get their room cleaned up enough for Wilma to get in it and do her weekly jobs. Danny and Bob Glasson (who was living with us at the time) decided to make this alert a time to tear up the room to give her something to do! What a pain they were for her and for me. She couldn't get everything else done because of the mess they made. I was so busy trying to get ready to leave for school that I didn't notice at first what they were doing. I think she must have had words with them to get it straightened out! The final straw for Wilma was when Danny and Ozzie decided to take hay and seal it in baggies and store it in Marianne's closet (she was away in college). They thought they could sell it and make tons of money! They always had some weird scheme going. Well Wilma found the baggies and quit working for us after that! Too, bad because she really did help me out.

Some time ago I found a book called Speed Cleaning by Jeff Campbell. It is now my "bible" for cleaning the cabin. He has a web sight with all kinds of cleaning supplies that are part of his cleaning philosophy. He has a huge cleaning business in California and has gotten housecleaning down to a science. He claims his teams can clean an average house in 42 minutes! I do believe you can get it done and spic and span in a short time with practice and the right tools, but I haven't quite reached that level, yet! I'm still trying to declutter my house which is the first rule. He even has a book for that too. I bought it years ago but it got lost in the clutter, hehehe .



My Cleaning "bibles"

Well, I better quit writing and don my cleaning apron and get busy! I need to finish quickly so I can go out snow shoeing again today. Yesterday I took pics of the moose trcks across our meadow so I'll have to get them up on my blog!



Me snow shoeing. Fresh moose tracks. Look how deep he was sinking!