spring cleaning...

All this lovely sunny weather, a new hoover and the prospect of some visitors next week meant that today John and I gave the house, what is known in the trade as, a good bottoming which freaks the cats out as they don't like the noise nor the disruption when they have just got themselves settled after breakfast!!!  I am not overly keen on disturbing the dust myself as it generally disagrees with me and I am left feeling snuffly and like I am about to get a cold.

There is no getting away from the fact that when the house is clean it feels so much better and my Bissell 2-in-1 makes light work of the floors and upholstery - in fact I hate to admit that I whip it out nearly every day to keep on top of things - John is amazed!!!  We still have lots of plans for the house - we don't intend to move anywhere else in our lifetimes so we want to make it as comfortable and as easy to manage as possible.  Over the next couple of months the final piece of the outside fencing will be replaced with aluminium as will the gate which, although I love it, swells and shrinks according to the weather and causes all sorts of issues plus with everything aluminium there is no painting or staining to be done.  We also plan the refurb of the small toilet and then the lounge will need painting once the woodburner is put to bed for the season.

It tickles me that the random play on the Ipod which contains thousands of songs always manages to hit a Christmas tune every time!!!  This is our original Ipod which contains the tracks of our years and sadly it has become detached from its Itunes library and the software I bought to back it up didn't work so we have to nurture this Ipod or else we will lose the majority of our music.

We are also desperately trying to find a replacement for our Griffin Evolve Speaker system which had detachable speakers which we could place around the garden - it was a fanastic piece of kit but the speakers no longer hold their charge and the batteries cannot be replaced - it would appear that we are hankering after old technology as everything now seems to be all blue toothed up.   Perhaps someone reading this can come up with a suggestion for a nice little Ipod docking station that will take the Ipod classic and with detachable speakers which we can cart around the house and/or garden - answers on a postcard please!!!

I am busy sourcing all the things I can from Amazon before Brexit and the inevitable duty charges that will be incurred if we purchase anything from a non EU country.

John was busy doing fire cleaning and DIY projects and came in and commented that there was a strange smell in the house which was an oh so funny sarcastic comment because the smell was in fact polish - my argument was that I had to wait until Mum could get me some polish because I didn't like the smell of the one I bought in Paps which could be mistaken for fly spray and was called Rokil which sounded like fly spray.

Don't faint but everything got a clean - probably for the first time since Claire the Cleaner came for our anniversary (I jest of course) everything except the mantlepiece which got forgotten and I only realised when I ran my finger across the top later on in the day and ended up with sooty dust all over it - that area was John's domain so he will be having some remedial dusting lessons over the next few days!!!

House all lovely and clean (apart from said mantlepiece) for a few hours at least wooooo hooooo that feels GOOD!!!

Update on villa-search - we recommended that Janice and Mick went for the one in Latchi and I have contacted the owner who has acknowledged my text but not as yet confirmed the deposit figure.  Once that is done and paid the family will book their flights and plan their trip.

As you know we are currently being well supplied with Pomelo fruit courtesy of Mum's neighbour Effie.  They are a thicker skinned and sweeter version of a grapefruit and if you can be bothered to extricate the fruit segments it is well worth it.

I don't like to throw anything away but haven't got round to making glyko with the skins yet - I thought that was all that people did with them until I searched the internet and now my mind is racing...

...the cats are keeping a safe distance from me and if I look in their direction to measure up the size of their heads they are shooting off!!!  Don't you think that Charlie would look lovely in a Biggles hat?????

Apparently boiled pomelo skin is good for treating frostbite which could come in very handy in the winter.