Maintenance Monday

Are we all back from our Holiday Cheer and Celebrations?

Today's Maintenance Monday is a soft pitch. I'm washing all the throw rugs. I know it's something that should be done more often than most home maintenance projects, but I don't do it as often as I should so I'm counting it. *grins*

Also today:

-The first day back to school after Christmas break. Everyone has completely forgotten everything they have ever learned in the last 11 years, so I'm blogging in order to not go crazy and start yelling and throwing things.

-The timing of the Zoo Keeper's arithmetic is awful. Apparently, we stopped for Christmas right before the page where she learns basic algebra. She has Holiday Brain, and now has to try to grasp the concept of the unknown number. It would help if she hadn't forgotten everything she ever learned in the last 6 years of school. What does a 5th grader need with algebra anyway?! I never did algebra in 5th grade! I didn't start algebra until grade EIGHT!!!

Okay, I'm better now.

-The Horse Whisperer starts a new 4-H club today...dog obedience and agility. The weather is very windy, so they might now actually begin today. I won't know until 3:30 whether or not we are going to this class. I hate not knowing. Better go throw something in the crock pot, just in case.

-IF I go to town for the dog thing, I have to go to one specialty shop to pick up patches for the Guitar Picker's new CAP BDUs since he outgrew the old ones and needs all new flags and name tapes etc. for the new ones. Then I have to pick up the Cowboy's BDUs from the dry cleaners, then I have to drop the whole caboodle off at ANOTHER shop to get it all put together properly because I would rather stick a fork in my eye than try to sew all those patches on in exactly the right places and make it look professional. All this without getting them all covered in dog hair since I will be taking dogs in my mom van to the dog thing.

-I have to get all the thank-you notes the kids wrote for Christmas presents in the mail. It's late, but better late than never, right?

I think that's all I have to do today. Better get to it!

Maintenance Monday

I'm tentatively starting a new thing called "Maintenence Monday". With it, I'm hoping to create an incentive to remember to do all the odd maintenance jobs that go by the wayside in normal day to day stuff. Each week I'm going to try to do a job and post it on Mondays. Here's my first one:

The exhaust fan in my bathroom was covered with dust. Easy start for my new MM post! I'll just grab a broom, sweep it off, and I'm already covered for my first week!
It went from this:

To this:

Not so good. Wouldn't you think that cover would just pop off so you could wash it? No such luck. This IS a "manufactured home", after all. It's not going to be easy. The job ended up requiring this:

And this:

So, after at least 10 or 15 minutes of scraping dust bunnies out of the ceiling, then another 10 minutes or so sweeping them off of everything in the bathroom and out of my hair, the job was done and I was rewarded with a nice clean vent that actually is able to draw the toxic air out of the bathroom instead of wasting electricity laboring to suck dust bunnies up.

You are welcome to join me in my little quest to do the forgotten jobs. Possibly, I'm the only homemaker on the planet that DOESN'T remember to clean her bathroom vent for 2 years. In any case, I haven't time to make up a cute logo or figure out Mr. Linky, so until I do have time, if you want to play this game with me please post a reply with a link to your maintenance post so I can go see what you do. I seriously need help even knowing what needs to be done, so you could help give me ideas for what I need to do for future Maintenance Mondays.