Weekend Cleaning


Weekend Cleaning
By Allan Olson
Most of those who have kids can attest that children often take the shortcut in cleaning – and I’m certain I was guilty of it myself at one time. This weekend was about getting some cleaning done at least Friday and most of Saturday.
Alivia found the cache, while Dad was searching in the wrong direction.
I started the project by cleaning a multi-named room downstairs – lately it had become a haven for everything – kid’s toys, too small clothes, books along with other stuff. I took it upon myself to get that project started Friday late afternoon before the kids were home and created quite a pile for them to get started on cleaning when they got home. Once I took that room to a point where I could really go no further, I tackled the downstairs living area – so I started moving furniture and that led to cleaning the closet and cleaning a large chest downstairs, that I discovered was another hiding place for clothes, toys and a variety of other stuff the kids felt like hiding in there. I also discovered while cleaning the living room and the large chest that it was apparent where our sock thief had been hiding for the last couple weeks. I’ll be the first to admit pairing socks is an extremely low priority in this house so we have “the sock basket.” Lately the basket has been lacking in socks forcing some of us to wear some of our “third string socks.” I had been a little perplexed on this problem but I guess not enough to investigate by the time I was done with cleaning all the hiding places – I discovered where they had been hiding everywhere but in the dirty clothes. So with all of those projects done – the rooms were ready to be tackled when the kids and my wife got home. Friday evening was spent doing just that – cleaning for over two hours and when we were done, it finally looked like an area in habitable for lounging again. With the two main rooms cleaned downstairs, we took the remainder of the evening off and watched a movie.
Saturday morning we started again – this time I helped Alivia in her room since once again the girls room was the worst, while everyone else had chores elsewhere. In the process of helping Alivia I found the “I don’t want to put away my clothes pile” – under the bed of course and mixed with the clean clothes were dirty clothes and of course more socks. So of course everything headed to the dirty clothes pile and added several more loads to the already growing pile of laundry. Sometimes it seems that’s all we do in this house is laundry, wash, dry, fold – repeat.
That evening we had some friends over for some of my wife’s excellent homemade pizza she made a variety of choices and plenty of leftovers for the next day. After a couple hours of visiting, they headed out the door and I headed to bed far too early. Sometime around 1 a.m. I found myself wide awake – wishing for more sleep, finally about 2 a.m. I turned the television on and surprisingly I found something to watch with little effort.
Sunday, was a day of rest, we had the cleaning done that needed to get done and other than feeding the washing machine and dryer not much else was planned. Around 1 p.m. the kids and I went for a drive and walked a couple forest trails between our place and Blackduck and found a few geocaches. Unfortunately for me, I made the errant decision to step over the dogs leash and he decided to move at that time and I planted myself on the ground. Of course it hurt some at that time and since I had two more geocaches I wanted to find, we continued our walking and all was fine. At least all was fine until I sat in the vehicle for the ride home and then sat on my chair watching a new show I found and today my leg is sore and likely will remain so for the next couple of days.
This week starts another busy week – more spring sports are kicking off their practices and along with that it’s Easter weekend which means a four day holiday for the kids. We plan to head north at some point this weekend for Easter dinner and I have my eye on a couple geocaches that I’ve been trying to get to since Christmas – so as long as the weather holds and nobody breaks anything, hopefully I will succeed in my plans.
Please remember to watch out for the buses that are carrying our most precious cargo. Also snap a photo or two to preserve a lifetime of memories. Thanks for reading, and have a great week! Feel free to drop me a line at cltimes1@arvig.net or stop by the office for a visit.



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