Spring Cleaning

Winter appears to be over and spring seems to have arrived.  I’m cautious saying this because of the record rainfall we’ve had so far this year.  In typical SoCal fashion spring lasts approximately one week then summer arrives for about nine months.  Spring is not only heralded by nice weather but my body thinks it’s spring too.  I wake up around 6:00 a.m. on weekends.  I get restless.  I want to throw the windows open and clean.

Today we worked on the horizontal blinds in the windows for the whole house.  Keep in mind that housecleaning is not my favorite activity on a nice day but I couldn’t ride this morning because the arena is still sloppy.  Yesterday I cleaned off my desk, which was a monumental task but it sure felt good to have it done.  Cleaning blinds takes several stages, the first of which is to figure out how to tackle the darn things.  I tried cleaning them with a damp cloth while they hung in the window.  I tried taking them down and using the dining room table.  Finally I resorted to taking them to the patio table, hosing off the biggest chunks then scrubbing each slat in its entirety.  Because I have a good husband, he helped me.  He took down the blinds and put them on the dining room table while I cleaned a set on the patio table.  Here’s the hosing and cleaning station (click on photos to enlarge):

You should notice several thing in this picture, the first being the lovely color of the sky.  It’s a gorgeous day here.  The other is the set of blinds in the foreground on the patio table, next to the blue bucket filled with warm water and PineSol.  If you look at the center of the picture you’ll see clean blinds air drying next to the pool.

In this picture you’ll notice my wonderful husband rehanging the blinds and hand drying them.  Yes, hand drying each slat that I painstakingly hand washed.

In this picture, our reward for working so hard this Sunday morning awaits us!  This wine rack is filled with lovely bottles of fine wine, including real French chablis, a South African dessert wine, and old bottle of Port, and several fine reds, including a Chateauneuf de Pape.  Okay, we won’t be sitting down for our reward (and not in its entirety at one sitting!) until much later but it’s nice to contemplate relaxing now that my hands are fried with PineSol and my ancient Birkenstocks are ruined because I didn’t think to change into rubber flip flops until halfway through the scrubbing process.  Such is the pull of spring cleaning!