Cleanliness is next to impossible

Sacred Saturday 2011

Sacred Saturday. This is a day that as a faire person is very important to me. It refers to the first free Saturday after faire ends. I haven't had a free Saturday since January. There are many ways to celebrate this long missed freedom, and mostly it involves a bow of sugary cereal and not much the hell else. Some people opt for bacon and eggs or dim sum but food is a fairly constant theme.

I would like to say that I follow with my friends and spend the day laying about doing next to nothing, but that would be a lie. I just can not do it. I have tried. I have cozied up on my couch with a book or the TV going and I just can not do it. All I can do is look around my disaster of a house and think about how I need to be cleaning it.

Now don't get me wrong, I am by no means one of those people who have to have and uber clean house. I am not a filthy slob either. I am more the type to live in comfortable clutter. However a season of faire does things to a house. Bad things. Dirty things.

Cleaning just really isn't something that can happen on a large scale during a faire season. I mean I can vacuum the floors once a week or so, and keep the kitchen clean enough to use, and the toilets at least get scrubbed once every couple of weeks, but that is all just surface cleaning. There is so much more that needs to be done.

So it is my Sacred Saturday tradition to do a deep cleaning of the house. I clean from the ceiling fans to the baseboards and everything in between. No room is left behind either, not even the rooms we never really go into. Two days of hard work to produce a sparkling clean house.

This year was a little different. Since Sacred Saturday fell on the same weekend as first Monday Trade Days at Canton, a group of girls were planning on an early day trip and I was invited along. I am a sucker for a good flea market and this one is the size of a small town, literally. The need to clean was still there though. I was torn.

In the end I did what any rational person would do; I took Friday off work and made that the first day of the clean. If you thought for one minute I was putting off the cleaning you obviously don't know me very well. It is almost a compulsion to do this cleaning.

This year was also different in the fact that I can not really bend my knee. I have strained the tendons on my right knee and haven't been able to bed it for over a week now. This made it practically impossible to do most anything at floor level. Thus none of my baseboards are clean. It is driving me a little crazy just now.

I also got it in my head to re caulk the bathtub and vanity in the master bathroom. I have done this before, and thought it would be an easy job. I really shouldn't think things like that. Whatever caulk they used on the bathroom vanity was insane. It was covered in plastic for one thing, and then under the plastic was a thick still sticky layer of goo. Think of stepping in gum on hot asphalt in July and that is the consistency this 10 year old caulk was. It took me nearly 45 minutes to remove three feet of caulk. It took me five minutes to remove the old caulk in the shower.

Of course I also experienced the problem that all the tile on the bottom row fell off once the old caulk was removed. I got a little creative, but in the end I made everything stay where it belonged and still look good. I am a caulk goddess.

It took me until about 5 on Sunday to finally finish everything on my list. My everything hurts something awful and I am exhausted, but it is done. My baseboards are still dirty and I left the kitchen and bathroom floors to be  mopped by the husbeast, but everything else in the house is clean. I even matched all the socks and pledged the ceiling fan blades.

Now that everything is clean I can finally sit back and relax. There is nothing I need to be doing and nothing to feel guilty about shirking. It is a calm that I can only achieve in a clean house. I know in a week or so it will be messy again, that is the way of things in a house that is well lived in.

For now though I am going to sit back and enjoy the fruits of my labor.