Cleaning is a drag

This will be extremely short because I am exhausted. However, I did try out the new toy today and am reporting as promised. One of the cats has been throwing up and doing other unmentionable things on the carpet. She is now restricted to the bathroom, which has the advantage of easy-to-clean tile floors.

But the spots on the floor remain to remind us of her problems.

I used the Bissell Spot Bot Pet floor cleaner, which says that you can just set it up and walk away while it does the work. There is some truth to this, but more on that below. After one cycle with the Spot Bot, our spot looked like this:

Better, but still showing some of the darker whatever-it-was. So I ran it over the spot one more time:

Much better. We'll see how it looks tomorrow after it dries completely.

Okay, so here's my opinion of this little spot cleaner. Yes, you can set it up and leave it to do its thing all by its lonesome. The cycle runs about 3-5 minutes, which is not an enormously useful chunk of time, but I managed to do some vacuuming and picking up so it wasn't a total loss.

I think this spot cleaner probably works best on relatively new spots, rather than on spots that have been around for a while. And if you have a lot of spots on your carpet, a carpet cleaner is probably quicker and more efficient.

Since cleaning was about all that I did today -- except for laundry -- that's it. Remember -- with Pesach cleaning going on, getting out of Dodge is kind of on a back burner for a week or so.

When Worlds Collide

The colliding worlds (right now, at any rate) are the world of trying to get this house ready to sell so we can leave Dodge and the world of trying to get the house and our lives ready for Pesach, which starts in about 8 days. Some of the goals of these two tasks are compatible -- like cleaning up the place. Sometimes the Pesach goals take priority over the getting-out-of-Dodge goals.

So today, in the interests of making room for our regular (non-Pesach) dishes to be moved out of the kitchen, we moved boxes without going through them. We moved them from the garage, where they have been languishing ever since we emptied the storage locker:

 To the new shed (not to be confused with the New new shed, which is still dysfunctional):

At the end of the process, we still had lots of room in the New Shed (which made me wonder why we thought we needed a New New Shed):

And there were three empty shelves in the garage that were also accessible because the boxes in front of them had been moved:

The upshot of all this is that there probably won't be much to report here for a week or so because getting ready for Pesach now takes precedence over everything else. I may, however, share some ruminations that have been tumbling around in my head recently. You never know.

Oh, right. And one more thing. Media Guy and Future Vet will be coming home at the end of the week for their Spring Break/Pesach vacation. Future Vet's room has been made presentable for him. The room that Media Guy uses, which is used by the Drama Queen when he is at school, is back to chaos:

The Drama Queen has been informed that this room must be spotless by no later than Thursday. Let's see what happens.

And I get to try out a new toy this week!

We'll see if it really cleans up pet spots, as advertised. Stay tuned.

Another Project (or two) Completed

Some time ago, the Wizard and I talked about taking out the ugly box around the kitchen light fixtures as part of our "beautify the house in order to sell it" campaign. The Wizard got a little done, but we decided it was a job for a younger person.

Today, Sports Nut had a hammer (well, a sledge-hammer) and decided to hammer in the morning.

 But before that, we had to move the kitchen into the dining room:

And have the kitchen counter inspectors in to make sure we didn't miss anything:

By lunch time, Sports Nut had made significant progress while watching NCAA basketball playoffs in the background.

Of course, there was dust everywhere:

Forensics experts would probably be happy to have a rug like that at the scene of a crime. All I can do is toss it in the washing machine and destroy the evidence.

Perserverance and sheer muscle power paid off in the end. The box around the light fixtures is gone:

Our plan is to replace the 3 light fixtures here with a central fixture that includes a fan. After the electrician gets the fan installed, we will hire someone to fix the holes in the ceiling and the hole in the wall that was left when we redid the kitchen two summers ago and moved the refrigerator's water line for the ice maker. And we will probably also have them repair some minor water damage elsewhere.

And yes, all that is in aid of leaving Dodge. So it's all good.

The demolition, naturally, left behind a bit of debris. In additional to all of these bits and pieces, there are two really long boards that formed the sides of the light box  waiting outside. They will be hauled out of reach of the small children who show up here from time to time. There was also a lot of dust, which we are still wiping off and sweeping up.

Happily for all of us, the vacuum cleaner finally came home! It can't do much about the dust on surfaces, but it's been a big help in getting the dust on the floors. I almost didn't recognize it when I picked it up from the repair shop, however. They cleaned it up as well as unclogging its pipes.

It may not be as obvious in these before (left) and after (right) pictures, but it sure was obvious to us. It sucks up the stuff on the floors again, too. Just look at Future Vet's bedroom now:

All those little lumps of black fur that were on the floor in yesterday's picture are now consolidated into one enormous black cat!

Several days, and one chocolate seder, later....

I do have an excuse for not updating over the past couple of days. Way back when I was in fifth grade in California, my orchestra teacher told me that I should always have an excuse ready, but never to confuse an excuse with a reason.

My excuse this time is that I was busy with final preparation for a Chocolate Seder, which was held last night. Now that the Chocolate Seder excuse is no longer valid, I got back to Future Vet's bedroom today. Here's what the room looked like at the start of the day:

Some boxes of books have been removed, but there's still a lot of work to do. More boxes of books were removed and put in appropriate locations and then I decided to tackle the dresser. All the clothes that were still in drawers that the cats could get into were covered with cat hair, so all of those went into the washing machine. And then I thought I'd put the drawers  back. Until I got a good look at the floor under the dresser:

Oh, my. There was enough cat hair on that carpet to make a whole 'nother cat. Which is something that nobody wants right this minute. (A kitten, now, might be fun -- but they have a sneaky way of growing up and becoming cats.)

The vacuum cleaner was still being bad, over at the vacuum cleaner repair shop. Or maybe it's just taking a well-deserved vacation. Servicing it certainly doesn't seem to be high priority for the people who told me it would be fixed by Tuesday afternoon.

Fortunately, I have a canister vacuum as well. After emptying that vacuum cleaner several times, the floor looked much better;

Later on, I will ask the Wizard to help me move the dresser back so I can put the drawers back so I can put Future Vet's clean (and possibly folded, if I'm in a good mood) clothes back into the drawers.

My real project for today was supposed to be going through this box of papers:

But I got distracted by getting ready for Pesach. Maybe this evening I will watch a movie and sort through this box. Maybe.

And here's the current state of Future Vet's room:

Not too bad, if I do say so myself. If I get the vacuum cleaner back tomorrow, I might even be able to finish up in here since the majority of the remaining work involves getting the cat hair off the floor.

Bizzarro Day

This picture is an illustration of just how weird today was here in Dodge:

What's weird about this picture is that the snow you see here (already melting in the sun) was the third snow fall of the day. All three times, the snow was falling heavily enough that we couldn't see the house across the street from us. All three times, the ground was completely covered with an inch or so of snow. And all three times, the sun came out after the snow and brightly melted all the snow.

The temperatures were fluctuating wildly. It was up to nearly 50 degrees this morning, then it dropped to the high 30s for the first snow. Then it was 65 degrees outside. Really. Then the temperature plummeted again to around 40 for the second snow fall. Up to mid-50s again, down to the high 30s again.

And, as you can see from the sky over the mountains in the background of that picture, it's quite likely that we will have yet more interesting weather before tomorrow morning.

So my plan for today was to work on the garden so we can plant things soon and to start getting serious about Pesach cleaning. While the gardening plan was affected by the weather,  the cleaning was not affected by the weather so much as by the fact that the vacuum cleaner is making weird noises and not sucking up properly.

Bad vacuum cleaner. Bad. We are pretty sure there's something in a tube that we can't reach and that the repair will be minor. So tomorrow, it's off to the vacuum cleaner repair store to see if they can fix it promptly. Pesach is just a little over two weeks away, regardless of whether you are in Dodge or not.

Since it has been such an effective strategy in the past, I am going to post a picture of the project I need to start on tomorrow (even if the vacuum cleaner isn't fixed yet).

That is Future Vet's bedroom. He will be home for his Spring Break in less than two weeks, so all that stuff I tossed in there to get it out of sight needs to be removed and put away. And the drawers I pulled out when I had to catch his cats and take them to the (present) vet need to be replaced. And the floor will, no doubt, need to be vacuumed. Since he occasionally checks this blog, I expect he will be on my case to work on his bedroom so that he can, you know, actually get to his bed.

What's been happening

Pesach. That's what has been happening. I have been working on getting ready for Pesach and, somehow or other, the decrapification process has slid into last place. The good news is that part of getting ready for Pesach is cleaning up the house. In the process, I am sure that some crap will depart. The bad news is, well.... part of getting ready for Pesach is cleaning up the house.

Nevertheless, it is Wednesday so I have a what-is-it for you. This one wasn't actually in my house, but I see it all the time and am still a little bemused by it. So I took out my camera and got a picture:

I think I know what's going on here, but am curious what others think about this.

Part of cleaning up for Pesach involves going through the food in the various food-storing-places and deciding whether we want to use it up, get rid of it, or sell it. While digging deep into the back of the big freezer, I found two boxes of these things:

The only person in the family who actually eats these has been living in California since last August, so I opened up one of the boxes and took a look. Sure enough, they didn't look too healthy and I decided to dump them.

Twenty fudge pops rather goo-ily down the drain.

In other news, I finished the knitting part of the large wallaby sweater I was making to match the small one I made for my two-year-old friend. The sweater is supposed to go to the older sister so that they would have matching sweaters. The two-year-old had her own ideas about that when she saw the sweater today.

I have to say that I think it fits her older sister much better, even though the hood is a big bit. I may take that apart and fix it before I deliver the final version.

Yuck. Still all those ends to weave in. We are hoping that, once the little one sees both sweaters at the same time, she will let her older sister wear the bigger one.

In addition to all the other projects going on, I have just about finished the booklet for my Rosh Hodesh group's chocolate seder next week. After the fact, I may make a PDF of the booklet available to anyone who is interested. Until then, it's a surprise.

So was this, at least as far as Canti was concerned:

I think Canti is trying to figure out just what that is. Acts like a dog, sounds like a dog, smells like a dog, but sure isn't the same size as a dog.

While in the process

Today Sports Nut and I moved boxes around in the garage so that we could pull out boxes of haggadahs for Passover, which is coming right up. While doing that, I opened up the boxes we had to move in order to get to the shelf where the haggadahs were stored, just to see what sort of things were in them. And, though they are not yet out of the house, I found three (count 'em --3!) boxes that were almost completely full of homeschooling materials that we no longer need.

I really don't need that top book any more -- all of the offspring are successfully in college. Tomorrow morning, these boxes are going over to a current homeschooler's house -- and thence, out of my life. The great work progresses.

Unfortunately, I haven't gone through enough STUFF over the past week to come up with a really good "what is it", so I'm going to show you something that I absolutely, positively know what is and was delighted to find today:

That, my friends, is a list of things that I need to be sure to buy for Pesach this year. I wrote it last year at the end of Pesach and filed it away with my Pesach cookbooks so that I would be sure to find it. And I did! Sometimes, the system works.

Progress that isn't really progress

This was one of those days when I did stuff, but nothing really advanced me toward the goal of leaving Dodge. I'm caught between holidays. I didn't get the Purim hamantaschen baking onto the food blog until today -- but the process and recipe for making home-made mohn filling and hamantaschen are finally there.

And now that Purim is over, it's time to start thinking about Passover. That will be a close-to-full-time project for the next four weeks. Because it's so holiday-oriented, the process doesn't belong here so much as on the Living in Galut blog, so that's where I wrote about it.

Mostly I'm just so tired now that I want nothing more than to go upstairs to my bedroom and crawl into bed with a good book. So, as soon as I refill the bird bath and feed Future Vet's cats, that's what I'm going to do. Tomorrow I may be more inspired.

Oy vey! Where did the time go?

Can it really be two and a half weeks since I updated this blog? Let's see.... first I had to clean up the house, which meant some areas became really neat and clean:

And other areas became kind of cluttered because that's where I dumped all the stuff that I couldn't deal with immediately:

The purpose of all this cleaning up was to host a hamantaschen-baking party for my Rosh Hodesh group. They came, we cooked, we ate hamantaschen!

And while we were hanging out after the Rosh Hodesh meeting, letting the young'uns make their own interesting confections,

We had the brilliant idea to have our own Purim celebration, complete with a Purimshpiel, which I obviously had time to write because I did. More about all that later, when maybe somebody comes up with some pictures of the shpiel. I left my camera available and asked various audience members to document the event, but all the pictures taken that evening (including pictures taken by my son the Sports Nut) were taken on other people's cameras.

All I have is a picture of the stage before the show.

At any rate, the last two weeks just whooshed by. Now that Purim is over. it's time to move on to cleaning up for Pesach. For one thing, I'm going to need to clean out Future Vet's bedroom before he shows up in a few weeks.

On the decluttering front, not much has happened between hamantaschen (which will be detailed on the food blog tomorrow, I promise) and the Purimshpiel (which will appear elsewhere soon) and watching the Olympics and dosing our poor Shadow cat with antibiotics twice a day (an enterprise which usually involves 10 to 15 minutes of chasing her around the room) and having an unwelcome visit from a head cold (which was polite enough to leave after a very short stay).

I did, however, start on my traditional day-after-Purim activity today. It's not exactly decluttering, but it bears a distinct resemblance.