¡limpiando por primavera, y un perrito nuevo!

The title is in honor of the fact that I used my first Spanish sentence in real conversation today, taking only about 30 seconds to compose it in my head instead of my normal 10 minutes plus a dictionary: "Mira! Limpiamos la casa esta tarde!" ("hey! we're going to clean the house this afternoon!"). Pretty pathetic, really, after 14 weeks of Spanish class. I tried to figure out some variation on "we were lazy slugs all day yesterday so today we need to get our butt's in gear to deal with this pit we're living in, despite the gorgeous weather outside" but that was far beyond my abilities.

We managed, even with the kids here and the baby teething and newly crawling and the perfect weather beckoning to us at every moment, to get a lot of spring cleaning and just regular ordinary cleaning done today. Spring cleaning tasks included super-cleaning the tile floors, kitchen and bathrooms; washing all of the mirrors, picture frames and windows (bless the person who invented tilt-in windows); getting the window fans out of the attic (it's going to be 80 tomorrow!!); and starting the hideously tedious process of cleaning all the blinds. Von didn't go for the idea of just replacing the blinds each year. I take them down 2-3 at a time, soak them for a while in the tub with all kinds of cleaning stuff in the water, then hang them up so that I can scrub and rinse off the dirt. I actually installed hooks on the wall above the shower surround just to be able to hang things up while I clean them. Today we only got through 3 blinds, which leaves just 20 more to go. Gah!!

Regular cleaning included 9 loads of laundry, countless trips to put things away, and super-cleaning everything used to hold a baby - since she's teething, not only does she drool on everything, but teething biscuit and cheerio goo covers everything within her reach. Von also didn't approve of my suggestion to just set the stuff out for the dogs to lick off all the crusted-on goo and find all the crumbs, and then we'd give it a good swipe with a disinfectant. Those critters need to start earning their keep, dammit!

Now, about the "perrito nuevo"! Here's a picture of our new rescued pug pup, Lucy!



She's been here since late Thursday night and she already thinks she owns the house and all of us. She was described originally as very timid - um... not! She's totally in the role of pesky sassy spoiled baby sister to our other two dogs, and silly spunky love-bug to the humans here.

Now, to give you some perspective on her verses our other rescued pug, Murphy, check this out:


Murph weighs 35lbs which would be morbidly obese to the point of hardly being able to walk for most pugs, but he's not really even overweight according to the vet - he's just a very big boy!! And Lucy weighs just 10lbs. Since she's only 7 months she'll get a little bit bigger, but she'll certainly never be even close to half Murphy's size.