Spring Cleaning, and a Blog in Progress

Spring Cleaning?

My Grandma Duerden (read more about her HERE and HERE), was a great one for doing a big "Spring Cleaning" every year. I suspect she was raised that way, and being the active person she was, she really went for it.

Every. Single. Year. I'm talking about a huge, knock-down, drag-out, Spring Cleaning here.

And I remember my mom also tending towards Spring Cleaning. I distinctly recall the smell of Pine-Sol as figuring strongly in the house when my mom cleaned. To this day, the smell of Pine-Sol means "clean" to me!

It wasn't until I was about a teenager that I realized what was actually happening behind the scenes. Grandma would get started on her Spring Cleaning, and then she would call my mom from Idaho, and start into a litany of the things that she had accomplished in the previous several days. Grandma was all about recalling her achievements. It might have been just so she could remember them herself, because I don't think she meant to use it as a "dig" at my mom. We didn't even live in the same state, so I'm sure Grandma had no idea about how clean our house was. Which it was.

But I remember my mom getting off the phone with Grandma, and feeling frustrated. With all of us young, active kids around, she couldn't accomplish nearly as much as Grandma did, but nevertheless, she sure tried. Without meaning to,  Grandma really guilted Mom into doing her Spring Cleaning. Because after the groans, growls and sighs, Mom would launch into her own version of Spring Cleaning. Somehow that always included "washing the walls and the woodwork". I used to think that walls and woodwork always went together in a sentence. Like flotsam and jetsam. To and fro. Kith and kin. You never hear one without the other.

(I believe washing walls and woodwork actually hails from a time when homes in most of the country were heated with coal. By the end of a winter with coal heat, there would be soot on all the walls in the house. Spring cleaning literally meant washing the walls to get that soot off. But I digress.)

I'd love to get my house deep-cleaned all at once. But it never seems to happen that way. I usually just deep-clean a certain area at whatever time I decide to tackle it. Spring is a good time, right?

Spring just happens to be the season when I decided to do a bit of Spring Cleaning on this blog. A bit of a cleanup. Maybe you've noticed we're sporting a bit of a different look here for the last few days. I'm still playing around with it, and I don't have it the way I want it. But I'm getting closer.

You can probably see that the background is much cleaner, and the posts are wider. Upcoming posts will have larger photos now, because now they'll fit.

Let me know what you think of it, both pros and cons -- like I said, it's not really done yet.

It's kind of like spring cleaning at my house: it never gets deep cleaned all at once! But thanks for noticing!