It's cleaning day.
The bleach is murder on my lungs but it is a necessary evil when one has cats and dogs.
One of the cats is a real shitter. We call her poopfoot. It never fails, she must hop into the box take a healthy steamer & get a schmear onto her tail.
She will back up over the heap, bounding out of the sandbox with a mighty leap and zoom throughout the house flinging fecal matter this way and that.
Before you know it she has managed to decorate and leave a trail of dookie here there and everywhere. You will see her 4 toed rear footprints in the most surprising locations, such as: the top of refrigerator or ledges of doors. Mind you, this is a 12.5 lb cat.
Sphynx cats have unnaturally long toes that remind one of gnarled gnomish phalanges. They are also quite adept with them, using them to pick up toys, bring food to their mouth and pawing their owners faces.
Because of these tootsies they also have the ability to climb into their kitty toilets, stand about doing some business and when they have a handful of pebbles to cover up any doodie they usually have a bit extra trapped between the webbing..taking it with them on the trip back out while scattering it all over the house!
Lucky owners that we are, we are left to sweep and mop up the remains constantly. Slaves to the cats. Long ago I gave up the Hoover for a ShopVac.
Dragging along one of those canisters, the powerful motor running and humming reliably and promising to suction up every granule.
Never missing a thing, making my chore easier..never any harder than necessary.
One trip through with that honey and then I can get right to work with my bucket of water, that's where the real work starts no thanks to my effing' mother and her training.
Why did I have to learn this habit from her?
Onto my hands and knees I crawl with a scrub brush in 1 hand, a rag in the other. My assault like Cinderella minus the glass slipper but I can feel the hot breath of an evil step-mother haunting me.
I think that perhaps it might be one of my old cats with halitosis, they come to assist me with all of the chores, breathing down my neck. Shoo them away all you want but they come back just like a bad penny.
Dunking my brush into the bucket saturate the tiles, I scrub and swirl, scrub and swirl feeling my underarm flab sway with the motion. I think to myself that if I did this every day maybe I wouldn't have underarm flab!
Nope, I'm not going to do that!
I work a 4 foot section, dunking my rag in and giving it a good wipe down, ringing it out, rinse and..
Repeat.
The water turns gunky and I know its time to switch it out. Is it because of the color? Or my hands have turned prune-like?
Maybe its the fact that I've tie-dyed yet another wife-heater with bleach, good thing I buy stock in these just for cleaning days.
My face is beet red, knees have dirt and litter ground into them and I have a line of sweat rolling down my butt crack.
Dead sexy!
Dragging the bucket to the basin because I'm not supposed to lift heavy stud yet, I scootch it all the way there until I reach my destination then steel myself for the heave-Ho.
Lift-grunt-pour.
Naturally (like an idiot) I splash myself, refill and start the next section of the house.
When I'm all finished with hand scrubbing the whole house I will go back through with a mop of citrus scented soap, this way the house won't reek of bleach. I had the windows flung open but it didn't help much because I had my nose jammed into the pail sniffing fumes the entire time.
Not even close to being unpacked, the Rubbermaid boxes are now landmines throughout the joint. Most are stacked into corners but some ate Willy nilly and have become cat jungle gyms, they need to be swept around and are just one more surface to clean.
Tomorrow I am having company over, the mortification begins.
I really can't stand seeing the place in such disrepair but what can I do? There isn't a magic wand to wave and then have it all miraculously put itself away.
The good news is (for everyone)....
My visitor is coming to install the internet!
Hot diggity damn! I will finally be back amongst my little world of social networking. Connected again to 'friends', able to upload my blogs, chat with total strangers, look at porn, play online games, Google stuff, (or myself..wait that's looking at porn) also forget about cleaning the house for awhile!
So I'd better make sure that the housework is attended to for the time being. After this fella gets his job done..its all going to Hell in a hand basket for a few days.
I'm going to be attached to the keyboard and screen for 24/7 until my eyes dry out and my fingers fall off.
