Enfin Clean

OMG my house looks SOOO clean!!! I've finally decided that housework and me don't mix. We don't mix on a week day, we don't mix on a Saturday morning. We especially don't mix when the alternative is vastly reduced taxes, a clean house and a cleaner in work.

The deal is that instead of paying a woman on the black which is fine for the payer but the cleaner gets no insurance and doesn't pay into any sort of social regime, you pay a reasonable price and half of it is deducted from your taxes. Everyone's a winner except the fisc's coffers and I'm not too bothered about filling them.

The cleaner is a fully employed member of a company, gets all the social advantages, and becomes an active member of the economy (so the gov gets lots back in VAT), and the client gets a clean house and pays less tax. Who could resist?

So there are all sorts of 'services' companies springing up offering cleaning, DIY, meals, childcare and so on; jobs that before were usually paid in cash, and have now entered the system. I'm amazed that the government has come up with a scheme where everyone is happy. How often does that happen?

I came home today after a blitz on my home - two cleaners for 4 hours. They did an amazing job because, while my house isn't big, it was in need of a good clean and tidy. What's more, one of them is coming back again on Thursday and then again for 4hrs a week thereafter (2x2).

I'll no longer be in a furious temper on Saturday mornings because I'm having to clean, or super clean because I've got people coming for dinner. Oh the joy of not having to do the housework! I'd quite forgotten how blissful it is to come home to a house someone else has cleaned.

I'm going to have to buy a new hoover though. My present one, my old faithful, has been with me since 1995. It was a wedding present and is a UK model upright. The cleaner would prefer something less unwieldy (her words, well, in French), so I thought I might get a mini Dyson or the cheaper equivalent (having seen the price!). When I suggested to my TWDB that I keep the hoover because you never know, and one of the boys might find it useful, he guffawed and said they'd be far too embarrassed to use it!

Actually, by that time you probably wouldn't be able to buy the bags for it, so that would be that. Embarrassed. Huh!

Clean Me

There are two types of people in the world, are there not, when it comes to keeping their cars clean. On the one hand you get the obsessive maniacs who are out there every Sunday hoovering, polishing, buffing, and generally ensuring the inside is as perfect as it was when it left the showroom.

On the other hand, you get people who have too many other things to do and only when it gets to crisis levels find a couple of hours to carry out a military-style blitz to bring the state of the car back to acceptable levels.

Guess which type I am... hehe.

So, yesterday, after a wet Sunday and a bike competition in the mud, crisis levels had reached Level 6 - 'AAARRGH' (ie full of mud, mud dust, bits of paper, pebbles, plastic gun ammo, broken toys and other sundry rubbish). I could have carried on ignoring it, but my TWBD and I are taking my car to Nice tonight so we can use the boot to carry garden furniture, and I know he would make cheeky remarks all the way there and back.

As I like my car and adore my TWDB, I pulled my finger out and spent 2 hours - yes, it took 2 hours - bringing it back to a civilised state. I emptied out the rubbish then took it to Carrouf to use the industrial vehicle vacuum. It took two sets of 7 minutes to hoover the inside, the boot and all the mats except one which I forgot about because it was on the floor at the front of the car and was hidden by the open door. Oops...

Then I banged the mats against the special mat-banging rack and, covered in dust, drove home. Then I dusted it with Pliz and cleaned the windows too. The only thing I didn't do was wash the outside because a) we've had a lot of rain recently and the car was quite clean; and b) it will certainly rain again soon, and definitely will if I wash the car.

I had asked my youngest if he wanted to help, and amazingly, he'd said no, he preferred to play footie. I couldn't ask my eldest as he'd injured himself yesterday running a sprint race at school and pulled a muscle or something. He can barely walk at the moment, poor lad.

I was very proud of the result of my hard work. The car doesn't look showroom clean - I'm not an obsessive maniac afterall - but it looks very presentable and certainly enough to silence any cheeky comments my TWDB might be inspired to make.

Actually when he saw it he was very impressed and pleased that I'd made such an effort on his behalf.

Awwww.

Wifi Fo Fum

There are five bags sitting on the landing destined for the Secours Catholique. Yet another blow-out tidying session in my youngest's bedroom. I'm getting ever more ruthless with accumulated crap. The bin was much in evidence as I stormed my way through a shallow box, the floor, behind the bed, under the bed and in the bookcase. Used holiday workbooks out, torn no use to anyone booklets out. Baby books out to the SC. The bookcase is no longer sagging and my hope is that my youngest can now find the books he likes to look at/read (ever optimistic, me).

I then went through my eldest's wardrobe which was filled with crap including my old text books from my business Masters. I don't think I could sell anything published in 1995 - it's all out of date management fads, but someone may find them useful if they just had to pay 50cents per book. Out also went my Arabic books. Space-consuming, they will never be read by me again, I know. I can't even read the titles any more! There's a lot of wilful forgetting in there...

It gives you a very good feeling to get rid of crap. We are weighed down with tons of useless stuff that just sits around taking up space both physical and head. I enjoy seeing the honed down emptiness of my youngest's bedroom. I think I like it better than he does to be honest but then that may be because it was me on my hands and knees emptying the crap into the bin while he wafted around pretending to be useful. He also kept discovering forgotten toys that I uncovered in the blitz so there would be cries of joy as he laid his hands on a formerly buried much-loved item.

I'm taking bets on how long the present tidy state will last. Odds on for at least a week... after that however...

We took the dead Christmas tree to the dump, together with the bike that had been rotting outside the front door for months, old school notebooks, three boxes of bottles, some old clothes and other tat. Out with the old, in with the new - the Christmas tree was replaced by three house plants which are supposed to absorb all the noxious fumes given off by household paint, glue and other sundry construction materials. I wonder whether we'll notice the new purer air.

There was a lot of catching up to do with clearing and cleaning. I had done little over the holiday period and consequently was obliged to devote an entire weekend to it. Complicating my single-minded pursuit of housework was my effort to connect the XBox to the internet via a wireless widget thingy. Time when I could have been hoovering my room was spent battling with technology, which won, to my disgust. My room still needs hoovering and we still have no connection.

Even the Technology Wizard himself, my TWDB couldn't get it to work. The wifi widget doesn't connect to the Live Box ADSL modem. Even when sitting right next to it, it is blind to its presence. I would take it back, but my eldest made a right pig's ear out of the plastic packaging when he opened it and I'm sure that Carrouf would just laugh at my request for reimbursement. I must remember not to let him get anywhere near opening risky packaging.

Does anyone have a wifi XBox connection which works?

Leftovers Take Over

Do you ever leave things lurking in the fridge? Left to fester, they become more and more unattractive to deal with, so they get left longer and longer. As you start running out of plastic containers to put things in, however, eventually you are confronted with the inevitable. You have to clear out the damned fridge.

If you live with a partner, the hope is that this is his/her problem or task. You may argue that as you are so busy, it falls to the less busy one to do the deed. You find yourself becoming incredibly overloaded with tasks - mostly unnecessary - so that you can prove just how busy you are. At work you stay late, to everyone's consternation (brain tumour? aspirations for promotion? is there something we don't know?), and at home everything becomes a model of efficiency, cleanliness (apart from the fridge) and tidiness.

The kids start moaning and insisting that someone, anyone (apart from themselves) just clear out the damned fridge so everything can revert to its normal sloppy self.

Living without a partner presents certain advantages and disadvantages. The main advantage is that you do not have any arguments. The main disadvantage is that you have to do everything, including clearing out the fridge. The toss-up between no arguments and sharing fridge duty is actually not an easy one to resolve...

I have been thinking about the inside of the fridge for some time. You may think that this is indicative of the paucity of other more interesting things going on inside my head, but you'd be wrong. I have a lot of quite fascinating things going on inside my head (due mostly to the extreme distance and lack of contact of my someone special), but the fridge was becoming pressing for the plastic container availability or rather, lack of, issue.

So, with sufficient build-up, mental preparation, and desperation, I opened the bin, opened the fridge and took out all the offending plastic containers. Thank goodness for the dampening effects of refrigeration on smell. Had anything been ready to blow up in my face with the explosive pressure of decay and accompanying whiff, I think I would have collapsed on the spot in a faint of disgust. Luckily, however, I took a deep breath and emptied the contents of the containers into the bin, rinsed them out and threw them in the dishwasher. I also chiselled out several ramekins of fat of some sort that had been saved for roasting potatoes, but after lurking in there for more than a couple of years, became decidedly unattractive as a cooking prospect. I was also told recently that fat doesn't stay usable forever and goes rancid, so even if you can't smell it because it's cold, it's not actually suitable beyond a certain age. Unfortunately I don't know what that age is, but I'm sure it's less than 24 months.

The dishwasher is full, my fridge is surprisingly empty and I have the halo of efficiency glowing atop my head. I do realise that throwing away food in these times of food riots is an absolute disgrace, but, in my defence, the food had been in there since BEFORE the riots started. My conscience is therefore merely cloudy.

Of course, each time I do a clear out, I promise myself that this will be the LAST time bits of leftover food are allowed to fester. So, true to form, this is absolutely the LAST time, that I'll leave containers of leftovers to lurk for more than two days. Everything must be consumed!