Catching Up!

Friday I cleaned a house.  Then I went to the grocery store while I was in town.  I also got a bale of alfalfa.  I decided to get three buckets of rocks on the way home.

Yesterday, Hubby and I went out to finish the last of the yard clean up.  I raked.  He used the fire stick.  We didn't make it all the way to the front but we did pretty good.  I was so tired from Friday that I had to quit.  So, one more rake and burn and we should be done.  Sometime in May is our last burn day so we have about 3 weekends left to do this.

I cleaned up the kitchen which really needed it and collapsed on the couch.  Too much physical labor is too much.  Today, I am resting up for the big day tomorrow.  1 1/2 cleaning jobs, getting into Carson City to buy glasses.  Home Depot to look at ponds.  That will be plenty.

Looks windy today and tomorrow and the lows are going to be as low as 34 degrees.  Sure hope we don't get a real freeze.

Cleaning Lady!

"Cleaning lady!", I holler as I unlock the door.

There was a time when I liked being a cleaning lady.  I lived in Las Vegas.  I owned my own business. I had lots of clients and those clients treated me pretty good.  I even grew large enough to have employees.  I did advertising.  I went to business lunches.  And, yes, I cleaned toilets.

That all changed when I moved to Northern Nevada.  For some reason people here don't seem to mind living in what is basically filth.  The first job I did up here, there was a shed gopher snake skin in one of  the bottom cabinets.  Why not?  There were plenty of mice to eat in that trailer.

I didn't clean many houses and I found a "real" job.  Later on I got married and I moved to a small town.  I started a new cleaning business there.

The people were okay.  They didn't tip me a full days pay at Christmas like every single one of my clients in Las Vegas did.  They gave me a basket they had gotten at work and didn't want or $5 or a tiny jar of homemade jelly even after working for them for several years.  Gee, thanks.  They give me the key to their home and they refer me to their friends and they love having someone they can trust coming into their homes and they adore me since I am good with their pets but a tip is out of the question.

I didn't feel well respected like I used to n Vegas but I could live with that.  I had a thriving little business and I was happy enough.

Then I moved down here to this area.  Every time I get a referral, it turns out to be nasty in their home.  They all have pets that pee and poop in the house.  No offense if this the type of pet you have but I have always considered it my duty as a pet owner to devise a system where the puppy learns to pee and poop outside.  I always clean up every puppy mess with doggy deodorizer.  If you can't afford doggy deodorizer, you probably shouldn't pretend you can afford a pet.

I never, no matter how tired I am, I never let dog pee or poop sit there on the floor or the carpet.  I clean it up and then I use doggy deodorizer.  If you leave any trace of the smell the dog wants to pee and poop there again.  How hard is it to understand that and just do the right thing?

Even the nice houses I clean seem to have dogs that pee and poop in the house.  Really, people shouldn't have pets.   They don't want to learn anything about these animals and they don't want to spend the time or effort it takes to train them to be good citizens.  I am not a member of some wacko pet group.  I just don't get why you have a pet if you don't want to learn about another species and how to interact with that species and what it takes to train it to a minimal standard like not pooping and peeing in the house.

All this goes double if you have a cat.

Then there is the mouses in the house issue.  Sure, we get a mouse in the house once in awhile.  We have traps and we trap them out immediately.  We don't let them stick around building nests in the cupboards.  These houses have mice running around on the counters.  On the dishes and pots and pans. There are mouse nests in the cabinets.  There are chewed open boxes of food.  Ick! That is disgusting.

On top of all of that there is the weird lack of repairing faucets that seems to go on.  The one client has had a faucet that doesn't just wiggle but has come completely loose and is just hanging by the pipes underneath on her kitchen sink for a couple of years now.  Surely, a person could find the funds to buy a faucet and pay a plumber to put it in sometime in the last several years.

Another place had a hand held shower unit that was frayed and sprayed water everywhere when you turned on the water.  I suppose that is fine if you are naked but I am wearing jeans and a T-shirt and I don't want to be soaking wet from cleaning the shower.  Ridiculous.  This went on for over a year.

At one of the places I quit cleaning,  the kitchen sink was backed up for weeks.  The guy was old but he has children that live in town and they did not step up and call the landlord for him.  He had mice, too.  Fortunately he didn't own a pooping, peeing dog like all the rest of my clients.  I did finally tell him I quit cleaning since I just couldn't deal with the mouse issue anymore.

That's my rant.  Every year for the last couple of years I have said I will clean for one more year. I also said I wouldn't clean anymore of these mouse houses but here I am heading over tomorrow to clean that darn house.  I should have told my friend I wasn't interested but instead I said I would go over and see what I could do for the nice lady.  And the lady is nice but her house is disgusting.

My one more year is half over and this time it may well be my last year of cleaning even the few houses that I do now.

Cold Nights

We have had a series of extremely cold nights.  Last night was thirty four degrees but the water in the horse pen had a skiff of ice on top so it is definitely ridiculously cold.  We reordered seeds on a two day air since we have to get the veggie garden moving soon to be able to have any chance at success.  So far, it is not looking good for the veggie garden.

The rest of the yard is thriving and I am thrilled.

The winds have been bad this year.  Some years are like this.  Every year we generally get a couple of 90 MPH winds.  This year we have had some 60 MPH winds  but they are just the worst of it.  Just about every day, it seems, we are having some major winds.  We had a year like that about six years ago but I think that year was very warm.  This year it is mostly very cold.  Yesterday's high was only 70.

This area of Nevada is always weird, weather wise.  There is no really normal year.  This year is, however, exceptionally cold for June.  I am threatening to put up one of those giant hoop houses so that we can do the veggie gardening without having to worry so much about the temperatures.

I have wonderful penstemmons this year.  The trees are growing larger.  I used the pressure pot on the irrigation lines and fertilized the yard.  So convenient.

Time to get out there and clean up the horse pen.  Supposedly it will be 77 and only 7 MPH winds today.  I would take the little horse out to play but I am exhausted and have to go to town to get my hair cut.  I cleaned a house yesterday for almost nine hours.  I am getting way to old for this.  It isn't done yet and I need to go back again tomorrow to try to finish it up.  Unfortunately,  it is such a mess that that will only be the living room, dining room, den, one bathroom and the kitchen cleaned.  The gal is in the hospital and absolutely does not want me to clean the bedrooms or the other bathroom which is fine by me since this has been a ridiculous amount of work already.

This house has dog pea on the floors and mouses have been living in the kitchen cabinets.  Ick!  I keep cleaning houses because I like contributing to my family but I kind of have to make myself keep cleaning when I end up at houses like this one.

Got Fish?

Hubby and father-in-law caught some beautiful trout.

Father-in-law caught these three beauties on the final day before we left and came home.

Bringing the fish in.

The weather was fantastic and a lot of fish were caught but the small ones all went back into the lake.

There was a couple of insect hatchings going on the one evening and the little fish were leaping and gulping and generally causing a stir while the fishing was going on.  Not a fish was caught that evening.

I am having a couple of people over for dinner.  Hubby is going to cook the trout on the grill and I am going to make Rice-a-roni and an almondine sauce for the trout.  No veggies from the garden yet so I am going with canned green beans.

Yeah, I should have run to the store since we are out of everything.  No powdered lemonade mix. no sodas, no fresh veggies but...it is hot and I am working hard around the house and yard, so we are all going to have to enjoy each others company and the food will be pretty good.

I raked up one wheel barrow load of weeds today.  Off to the compost pile.  I cleaned out the horse pen.  There's another wheel barrow trip to the compost pile.  I swept off the breezeway and cleaned out the dog kennel.  We keep straw in it to keep the dog warm in the winter.  There's another  wheel barrow load.  Then, another round of yard raking.  Wheel barrowing again.  At least that is caught up.  I took several loads of stuff to the wooden shed.  There's three more wheel barrow loads.  

I managed to get the laundry washed and hung out.  After a couple of hours I brought it all back in and got it put away.  I cleaned the kitchen counters.  I linseed oiled the maple counter top and the wooden cutting boards.  I swept and sorted and put away a ton of stuff from the breezeway. I washed off the table that sits out there.  A lot of grime builds up in a winter and a spring.  I feel like the area is "caught up" and should be easy to keep up with now that it isn't the mess that it had become.