Spring Cleaning Blues!

It’s that time of year again, in the interior of Alaska, where you open a window for the first time, after 8 months of winter, and take a deep breath of clean, refreshing spring air, without freezing your lungs.

One of the first signs of Spring! Melting icicles!

Photo by Michael Kingston

And then… suddenly… the …*feeling*…starts, (feeling = “Oh! My! I have got to clean this up!!”) And everywhere you look you will get a “magnified” view of dirt, grime, clutter, cobwebs, dust, and piles of stuff. Causing you to wonder “Why didn’t I notice this before”?

You’ve never noticed this *disarray* all winter. I swear it is an unspoken phenomenon having to do with the spring sunshine. And, it seems to have an effect on women more then men!

Quite frankly, the one thing I’ve noticed the men doing during the first signs of this Spring phenomenon…is…they enter the sheds and start digging out the fishing and camping gear…setting up tents all over the yard to air out!

Another sign of Spring; no more ice covering the water in the lakes, streams, and rivers.

Photo by Michael Kingston

It starts out simple enough, you begin by brushing down a cobweb you just happen to notice, and then you look around, and you notice something else that needs to be cleaned, which causes you to notice another thing, then another and on and on it goes.

The worst is when you finally get through the house, you find yourself carrying piles of stuff to put in the shed or garage for “safekeeping”, and when you open the door…yup! There goes that “feeling” again.

So, you start plowing thru everything in there, pulling pile after pile outside to reorganize and clean up.

This is when you discover where the squirrels have been nesting all Winter, which wasn’t really hard to find, because there’s a huge mountain of pinecone debris and some stuff that looks like…well… ummmm…well…there is just no description for it other then Ewww! Nasty! Yuck!

So you clean all that out, with all the stored stuff that’s been ruined, pile it up and light up the first burn pile of the season!

Once that job is done, and you are completely exhausted. You look around and feel quite proud of yourself. You can finally relax

And as you sit down at the computer to do a little surfing and game playing, you glance up and your eye-sight lands on a bottle of engine fluid that you sat by the door, to be taken out to the car, so with a sigh, knowing that if you don’t do it now, it will continually bug you and ruin your relax time.

You reluctantly take the fluid out to the car. And as you open the car door, a smudge of mud, from driving on “Break-Up” roads, gets on your hand. (Break-up = huge water puddles, Thick slimy mud and potholes)
I don’t even have to tell ya what happens next…So, you resignedly start cleaning out the car, wondering how you managed to get all that stuff in there.

Put it all away, and clean the inside of the car, shampoo the seats and carpeting. Clean the muck off all the windows.

Then of course you have to drive it to the carwash to clean up and polish the outside. When you bring it home, it’s shiny outside, and smelling clean on the inside.

You go into the house, now knowing that all is well, and sit down with your laptop for that much deserved down time.

Then! You notice that your files are not quite right; they need to be more organized…Sigh!

CU