Fell of the horse

I totally fell off the cleaning horse sometime just before Easter break, but today I climbed back onto it.

I was up at 6:10am, 40 minutes later than I wanted to be up by, but at least I was awake and out of bed.  The weather is icy here.  It was -3°C this morning and the weather forecast said we would see a maximum of 13°C - and we are still a month and a half away from the middle of winter.  I think this is going to be one of our coldest winters in years.

I did manage to get a load of laundry washed and hung up (indoors) to dry.  I also packed away the dishes I washed yesterday and made the bed before heading off to work.

During my lunch break I went home and packed up 1 box of stuff from the kitchen cupboards.  For those of you who don't know, I'm moving from my 1 bedroom home into a 2 bedroom home.  I got the keys today so I also went to take a look during my lunch break.  These are the joys of living in a city where it takes 20-30 minutes to travel from one side to the other.  It's a 5-10 minute drive to and from work, and my new home is only a few blocks away from my current home.  I'm so excited, I have such big plans for the place - the first one is to take a bubble bath... a nice long bubble bath!

 

However, I got a nasty surprise while looking in the cupboard - a spider, about 10cm big, with lots of hairs on it’s legs.  I left it alone for now, but it is going to be sucked up by my vacuum cleaner eventually.

 

So this coming weekend is move weekend I hope to take some photograph’s before I officially start the move.  Maybe I’ll post them up here when I have the opportunity.

Challenge: Recharging the batteries

Yesterday morning I slept in and only got out of bed at 7:20am.  I had 30 minutes to shower, dress, feed the pets, pack for work and get to work.  At 8:50am I headed out the door ready to start my day.  I needed the extra time to sleep this morning. BUT…

When I turn the key in the ignition of my car, the engine made a Woo-Woo sound, the gages went crazy, the mileage reset itself and I got nothing.  I try again and the same story happens.  So I phone William – he gives me a long detailed explanation on what is wrong, but doesn’t tell me what I should do to fix it.  So I pretend to listen and eventually say goodbye with instructions to send him the dealership’s phone-number. 

Second round of dumb luck, I haven’t driven the scooter for a couple of day’s and the battery of the scooter is also dead.

I phone my mom to get the dealership’s phone-number from her (since she kept the invoice) and she decides I should rather phone my uncle first.  I get hold of my uncle and he phones the place who installed my alarm.  Long story of phoning back and forth, but the end result is that the people who installed the alarm come to fetch my Ford and drop me off at work.  They replaced the battery and now I have a working car.

So this got me thinking about recharging our personal batteries.  Why is it that we usually end up waiting until we are on the brink of going crazy before we recharge our batteries?  While our endurance may be higher than that of machines, we also need our batteries recharged from time to time and occasionally we also need to go in for repairs.

There are many simple ways throughout the day that we can recharge our batteries.  Some of my favourites are to:

~ Lie flat on my back on the floor in a quiet room for 10 – 15 minutes.
~ Sit quietly in a chair with a cup of tea and not do anything except sit and drink my tea.
~ Read a book in a warm comfy bed in the evenings (or occasionally for a whole Saturday afternoon)
~ Take a warm candle-lit bubble bath.

Unfortunately, my current home doesn’t have a bath tub (only a shower), so I only get to have a bubble bath when I visit my mother.  Luckily, my future home (from the 1st of May) does have a bath tub – so you can guess what will be the first thing I do in my new home!

Question – leave a comment:
What do you do to recharge your batteries?

Challenge:
Do something this week to recharge your batteries!

Pot Challenge

William bought me a set of 3 pots.  I love them!  When William wanted to make supper a few nights ago he accidentally burnt the Tomato Soup - badly!  He didn't want to even think about cleaning up the mess, and it took me 2 days to convince him to just throw out what he could and I would clean the rest of the pot.  That burnt mess was standing on my stove for 2 days!  William behaved like a 10 year old being told to clean his room and I was the mom in the scenario.  Looking back it was quiet funny.

So, after finally throwing out the mess together (he held the packet and I scooped the mess into the packet) he left me to wash the pot.  I soaked it with boiling soapy water for 3 days (adding new boiling water once a day) dreading trying to get the layer of black off the bottom. 

When I washed the dishes today I decided that I would just see how much I could get off in 5 minutes then let it soak over night again.  To my surprise, as I started scrubbing the black stuff started moving in one big mass, and I literally was able to pick the entire chunk of black up in my hand and throw it into the dustbin.  Then the pot washed as though the soup had never been burnt!

This got me thinking about the rest of life.  Sometimes we buck God/world/other, or we dread doing things we have to do, or we are scared of change, or we want to wait for the perfect moment, or we come up with other excuses, but what we really need is to just get our hands dirty for 5 minutes.  We need to face our fears head-on, even if it is in small pieces, and usually we'll find that it wasn't so bad.

Challenge:

Do something today that you have been dreading doing – even if it is only for 5 minutes.

Budgie Stitch

Here is a picture of the new addition to my budgie family.  Her name is Stitch.