Warm Fuzzies

The photo of this card is deliberately out of focus. It's a visual analogy for how it made me feel. While you may not feel the warmth from the photo, you can detect the fuzziness lol.

My day was made today by this gem that arrived by snail mail. If getting a large, coloured handwritten envelope in your mailbox when it's not even your birthday isn't exciting enough, when it contains a card such as this it gets uber good.

It's also a reminder that it's often the simplest things that have the greatest impact in terms of making a person fell valued and appreciated. Even more so when there's no agenda behind the gesture.

Many, many thanks to the person, who will remain nameless in this post, who thoughtfully created and sent this card. It certainly made me feel humble and proud. And warm and fuzzy.

The Time of Year I Love to Hate

I know it's a good thing to be able to annually purge your property of all the accumulated junk that is gathering dust and taking up space. The local inorganic collections allow us all to do this, and I have certainly taken advantage of the opportunity this year.

Like the responsible citizen I am, I follow the rules and wait until the prescribed dates to load up the grass verge with my broken and worn out large inorganic items. I do this neatly, making sure that, as is requested, everything is left tidy and compact.

But no sooner is that done than the old adage 'one man's junk is another man's treasure' comes in to play. The vultures in their people movers scour the carefully stacked piles for what they consider to be useful. In my case I could barely unload the car before someone was baring down on my castoffs. And they don't care how slowly they travel, how spontaneously they stop, or where they stop - middle of the road, across the driveway...

Certainly they give no thought to retaining any 'order' the the junk piles. By today, the third or fourth day since most of us put our 'junk' out, shrapnel is spread across the road, broken glass is scattered through the piles and the whole suburb is, quite frankly, an eyesore. (I know I am generalising here, and lumping all the pile browsers into one unsavory category, but ... if the cap fits.)

As I said, I appreciate the opportunity to get rid of unwanted junk. But I wish it'd be picked up sooner, so that our neighbourhood could be spared the embarrassment of looking as it does today.

Beware What Lies Beneath...

We all like to think we keep ourselves, our houses and our belongings clean. For me that can be an extra challenge with three long-haired, (formerly) inside dwelling dogs. I say formerly as I have been encouraged to let my 'babies' rediscover their true natures and be 'dogs' again instead, and part of this is having them spend more time outdoors being animals. But that's another story.

Having dogs and trying to keep things clean for me involves a lot of washing -  of floor coverings, dog beds and towels etc. Hence a large number of my washing machine cycles contain loads made up of those items.

I hadn't ever really given much thought to the effect this was having on my washing machine. My mother did surmise at one stage that perhaps dog hair might clog things up in the hoses, but this proved  not to be true. I certainly hadn't given any thought to what was accumulating behind the drum etc, which the ordinary person ordinarily never sees.

When you have a clean freak partner (that's a compliment honey) who knows from experience the effect washing dog stuff can have on a washing machine, and who has the expertise to dissect one to prove it, you could be in for a shock with what lies beneath.

I sure got one helluva shock. You'd presume washing machines would be clean receptacles, and I was totally grossed out to think I had been washing my clothes in what I saw, which is what you see in these photos. I'm not proud to admit it!

However I'm lead to believe that it's not only 'dog stuff' that could cause this residual build up, so my blog post is one of social responsibility; encouraging those of you who, like me, were blissfully unaware of what lurks in places you don't often see, to find yourself a handy man to show you the error of your ways. And try not to throw up as you scrub it all away...





PS Here's my new weekly haunt to take care of the doggy stuff so my newly cleaned machine remains pristine!