Sept. 9 - Lisa's Musings (on dirt) and Every Day Life

Let's face it, when you live alone -- well, without another human -- there are certain things you just can't do by yourself.

Like move bulky or heavy objects.

As the song goes, "It takes two, baby, it takes two."

And that's where best friends come into play. Now, of course, best friends are great for lots of things, but when you have friends who will come to your house to help you with dirty stuff -- now that's the mark of a true friendship.

Take today, for instance. My friend, Becca, took two hours out of her day to come and ... are you ready for this ... nail screen protectors into place on my three-season porch. It was one of those two-person jobs but instead of me smacking my thumb with the hammer, she took over the job.

Now, I don't expect the mosquitoes or moths to respect these additional barricades, because to really keep them out I'd need to replace all the screens and quite frankly, that's not gonna happen anytime soon.

The purpose, at least in my mind, for these adjustable screen thingers is more of a visual barricade for the dogs, who have poked holes in the screens when they stand with their front feet on the window sills to bark, and scream -- yes, Toller's actually scream -- at the deer. The deer could care less, of course, but they think they are doing something to protect me, I'm sure.

But in doing so, their toenails made some pretty serious gashes in the screens and the bugs have taken advantage of these holes and are flying around my house.

So, task No. 1 complete -- thank you, Becca.

I was relegated to holding onto Driver so he didn't lick Becca in the face the whole time.

We moved onto task No. 2. Moving my plant stand and my kitchen table, so I could actually clean the accumulated dirt, dog hair and dead bugs from underneath. And, yeah, clean the floor for the first time in, oh, more than a year.

So get this -- not only did she help me move stuff, she actually helped me clean the months and months, OK, probably years, of dirt off the metal stand.

What I've found is the problem with planning to clean one thing turns into more than one thing because once you get in there to do one job, five others present themselves. So, when I sprayed the plant stand, the stuff hit the window behind it which meant, yup, I then had to clean the windows.

Ya see, that's the problem with dirt. If you don't find it, it finds you.