Payback Time!

Yesterday I went on a cleaning frenzy.
Today and probably tomorrow I pay for it.

I started out by giving the parrot’s area a good cleaning. Her space takes up one end of the living room, with a big cage, freestanding recreation center, and another play space on top of a wood heater that’s only used when we have no electricity, and therefore no heat.

The cast iron skillets to the left are there for a reason. They hold down old magazines for Baby to chew on. Everything in the top part of the picture is space for her to roam & play during the day.
Birds are messy, and it takes a while to get everything clean and tidy. Scrubbing bars, getting down on my hands and knees to get the vacuum hose back under the cage… it’s a fairly strenuous undertaking.

I needed a rest after that. But I didn’t rest too long until Jonathan and I got busy cleaning the house. It doesn’t take long to say we swept and mopped floors, vacuumed carpets, dusted, and scrubbed toilets, sinks, counters,mirrors and tubs in the bathrooms, etc. We also ran the dishwasher, and threw the rugs from the bathrooms in the washing machine.

Yes, it took a whole lot longer to actually DO all that than to tell about it.

I definitely was in need of a rest after that. And I did take a break and have lunch and watch a “Murder, She Wrote” rerun. Then I headed outside to throw scraps to the peafowl, top off all the water buckets, and spray out the feed troughs.

Rest again. THEN I had a Piggly Wiggly plastic bag full of green beans our next door neighbor sent over to deal with. I cleaned them and broke them into smaller pieces. Jonathan walked by while I was working on the beans. I mentioned I was glad I didn’t have to string these beans. “Strings!??? How would you string a bean???” Obviously, he's not a gardener. By the time he was old enough to help in a garden, we didn’t live where we could have one any more.

I’d put some honey-mustard chicken in the slow cooker early in the day. With the fresh green beans, creamed corn, flavored rice, breadsticks, and cornbread stuffing I had supper ready. I don’t usually fix quite so much, but it made “planned overs” for Jonathan’s meals at work the next couple of days.

Of course, THEN I had a very messy kitchen to clean up, and I needed to blanch the rest of the green beans and freeze them. By the time the dishwasher was loaded and running for the second time, the counters were cleared off, and the green beans in the freezer, I was one totally tired Tish. And I could already feel the beginnings of payback.

Today will have to be passive physically. My body is rebelling and making it’s displeasure felt big time. Chunking down 3 Aleve at a time barely makes a dent in the pain levels. (I laugh at their commercials that essentially say, “Take ONE Aleve, feel GREAT!” Ha! And again I say, HA!) If I’m lucky, I won’t get to the levels where you feel like banging your head against the wall.

Paybacks are… well, you know!