
Yesterday I had to fly to Glasgow for a meeting. While I was hanging around the departure gate at Birmingham airport, I spied a rack with all of Roger Hargreaves Mr Men and Little Miss books. I use to read the Mr Men books when I was little but the Little Miss books were released when I was a teenager so I've never read them.
Until now. Quite what people thought of a grown women sniggering and reading the Little Miss books I'm not sure, but I had a lovely time. However, it appears the universe presented me with a unique opportunity to think about change. The first book I picked up to read was little Miss Busy. Little Miss busy doesn't get enough sleep and scrubs the house from top to bottom and bottom to top until she falls over unwell, and is forced to go to bed until she recovers. Just when she thinks she's better and raring to go, she's told she needs to rest for a bit longer and then she has a relapse with the stress of being forced to rest.
Considering what my weekends are like, it was a highly appropriate cautionary tale (apart from the whole falling over bit), and I think a few changes are in order. In fact, this weekend bordered on manic.
Saturday
If I'm at home, saturday mornings are always pretty busy for me before I even start on deep cleaning.
I usually aim to get done all the washing that needs to be done finished by 1pm - one coloureds, one lights, the towels and the bedding. Sometimes I even put a load on Friday night - mostly our working clothes - so the first load is ready to hang up to dry first thing Saturday. This warm weather has been a godsend and I managed to get two loads done, on the line and dry by midday. By 4pm all the washing was done and almost dry.
Then I get the kitchen shipshape. It's descended into chaos by the weekend, so by Saturday morning I always have to wash up, take the recycling to the main bin outside, change the rubbish bags, wipe down the kitchen counters from back to front, wipe off the cupboards, clean the range (although thanks to the halogen oven it doesn't need a lot of cleaning any more!) and sweep/hoover the floor and under the cabinets.
Somewhere in between that I, Martin and the cats have breakfast and the chickens get opened up and inspected as they troop out.
To add to the kitchen cleaning this weekend, I unscrewed all the sink drains and cleaned them out to stop the nasty gunge and niffs building up. There's usually a screw in the centre of the plughole which you can undo, but be prepared for what lies beneath. I'd left it so long this time the scum had almost evolved into a living being. Gross. It took me nearly an hour to clean everything in the main sink and the half bowl with bicarb, vinegar and a toothbrush and then reassemble it.
Then I attacked the downstairs bathroom, which usually doesn't need a great deal doing to it as I keep it clean as I go during the week. The toilet gets a once over, a quick wipe round the sink and then the floors get a wipe over. This weekend I also had to do the shower drain, which had got clogged. I had to use caustic soda to remove the blockage as no amount of poking, bicarb, vinegar, lemon juice and boiling water was shifting it. Nasty stuff caustic soda and I hate using it, but it shifted the blockage very quickly, and then I gave everything in the shower a scrub down too.
Tea break time and while sitting there I suddenly remembered I needed to rack off my cider this weekend.

So I spent a hour siphoning off the cider into clean sterilised containers ready to sit and mature for a few more months, and in between the bottles filling up I washed the dirty containers.

Pear cider - made with baking yeast on the left, champagne yeast on the right
Then the bed was changed and the sheets were in the wash shortly after.
By that time I knew I couldn't put off a job that had been building up - cleaning the toilet in the upstairs bathroom. Martin and I rarely use this bathroom during the week, so it was with some shock when I lifted the lid on the toilet to discover a limescale and gunge build up that no amount of scrubbing removed. I used the plunger to push as much of the water in the toilet up into the soil pipe, and then added a litre of malt vinegar. Then I left that for a couple of hours. Later a quick scrub around with a toilet brush and a few flushes and the toilet was sparkling once more.
Instead of having to cook dinner, Saturday night was spent scoffing fish and chips at Martin's parents. I managed to get a few more lines done on my knitting - a cowl for my winter lunchtime walks. I'm making it from a handknitted jumper I found at a car boot sale and unravelled.
Sunday
Up at 8:30 and dished out breakfast to all the living beings in the house and cleaned out the cat's trays. Then I yanked out the ironing board, revved up the iron and while on the phone to my mother and a friend in Australia managed to zip through everything I had washed and dried the previous day plus a few renegade items that seem to sit on the ironing basket for months.
Yes, I was on the phone for that long!
While listening to Martin swearing and cursing as he constructed a large 2 metre high cupboard in his hobby room, I tidied and dusted the entire living room, cleaned and polished his silver trophy on the mantlepiece (which he won this year for his dedication and services to his car club), cleaned the fireplace, scraped off all the cat fur from various spots and hoovered. I had to take one of the rugs outside and give it a good slap against a wall a few times to get all the grit out.
Then it was out to the garden, where I spent an hour rapid planting winter veg - cabbage, purple sprouting broccoli and leeks. They looked a bit sorry for themselves as they had a bit of an exciting journey through the post.

After a restorative cup of tea and half an hour reading Ann Hoffman's Practical Magic, I was back out in the garden. This time the poor chickens got my undivided attention.

I washed and scrubbed their feet with savlon water, sprayed on scaly-leg deterrant, checked their bums and cleaned up any dirty feathers, treated them for lice, fleas and ticks, trimmed their beaks and claws, and then gave them some concentrated vitmain solutions as a booster.

Unfortunately the vitamin booster kicked in while I was cleaning out their coop, so I had five nutty chickens zipping round my legs and clambering into the coop while I was trying to finish off. Lulu was doing laps around the pen at speed for no other reason that she could and was shortly joined by a Georgia-belle doing a roadrunner impression. It was like an athletics meet with all the poultry in motion. Next time I'll clean the coop first ;-)
After a quick freshen up where I removed all the surplus savlon, louse powder, scaly leg spray and chicken poo from my person, I dusted the upstairs bathroom (pausing to admire the sparkly toilet) and our bedroom, before moving on to hoover the entire house from bottom to top.
The bread machine took care of a loaf of banana bread destined as part of Martin's lunches this week while dinner was slapped into Hal at 6:20pm - a butternut squash curry - and I disappeared into the bath for an hour with a glass of cold cider and a good book. I emerged a new women an hour later ready for eating, watching a film and doing some knitting in the living room.
At which point Martin looked round and said: "Have you cleaned in here today?"
I almost retreated to bed in a huff.
Little Miss Busy was not amused.
But it does beg the question - why do I put myself through all of this if really no-one but me notices?
I think I'm becoming more like the Hargreaves character every day...