Aftermath

It's been four days since I did anything catastrophically stupid (as opposed to the relatively minor stupid things that I do, like shaking the opened jar of baby food instead of the closed one), and eight days since the beginning of the week of fire and fleas, but the fun is not over yet. We are still dealing with the aftermath.

The good news: no new flea or flea bite sightings. We still haven't figured out what to do with the two giant bags of stuffed animals - do we wash everything or just assume that the stuffed animals are free of flea contamination? I don't know. There is still one room in the house that hasn't had any flea treatment and we should probably do that room too, but we haven't gotten to it yet.

The bad news is that cleaning every exposed part of a kitchen is a monumental task. We have two hanging pot racks
a ton of spice jars on racks on the wall (I know, spices should be stored inside a drawer or cabinet, but we don't have room)

stuff stored on top of the fridge
a big Ikea shelving unit with a number of open shelves
etc. Try looking around your own kitchen sometime, and imagine having to clean everything that isn't in a drawer or cupboard. Of course you might be like my mother, who puts everything in her kitchen away (and I mean everything - even the toaster and the stand mixer get put away) but I have neither the personality nor the space to do that. (Of course I could try having less stuff, and we're working on that. We've taken several bags of stuff to Goodwill in recent weeks).

Yesterday's task was to clean every bit of the oven to remove as much ash as possible before we try turning it on. My oven doesn't have a self-clean function so it was just me scrubbing. The other project I tackled was just about as much fun: we have an Elfa wire storage unit of four drawers on casters

that holds all of our plastic storage containers


and most of the baking dishes.

All of the contents as well as the actual cart itself had to be cleaned. Fun.

I stayed up until 2:00 am on Saturday night finally getting a handle on the laundry, so that's at least back to the normal level of chaos.

All of this cleaning has seriously cut into the time I have for knitting. I'm about halfway up the sleeves on the flower pullover, and I'll be very lucky if I get it finished. I have done basically no other Christmas gift preparation. I'm going to place an Amazon order today (with some credit that I have) of books for my nephews. Other than that I don't know what I will get done. I alternate between being too tired to care and being really freaked out about it.

Thanks to the efforts of the hubby we did manage to get Christmas cards underway this year. We ordered them through Ofoto (or whatever it is called now) and the front of the card is a twenty four small photos of the family in a grid. They look really great. The hubby got the envelopes addressed yesterday, now we just have to write in them and send them.

Today I get to open the windows, set up the fans and turn on the oven. Hopefully the smell won't be too bad. I'd like to be able to do at least some holiday baking - I promised dd that we would make some cookies. And there's that special bread that my mother always bakes for the holidays that has to rise three times...