The White Shag Rug

My “stuff” is all crammed into a 5 by 10 storage shed. Whew! It went well I think. Well, I did have a wee bit left over after all the giving away, selling and packing off to the shed. On Oct 30 and 31 there was a half ton truck load and 4 small loads in my car which had to come with me to the house. I expect to have less when I leave here as there is a lot of sorting to be done on clothes and files and other small personal stuff. Now, I wonder what I did with the whole month of holidays. I always seem to do it this way, packing boxes as the movers are carrying them out, moving mountains of stuff in my car because it wasn’t packed in time for the movers. Well, I am here now and that is all that matters. I have 8 months to get ready for the next move where the plan is to emerge from here with only a back-pack ready to take on the world.

I am not naturally a neat person, in fact, I am happiest if things I use regularly are just sitting around where I can easily grab them. As a house-sitter things can’t be quite like that. My new temporary digs are very pristine, nicely furnished and artfully decorated. Clutter has no place here. Everything that I use I put right away after. The environment appears untouched, except of course, for my bedroom/office where I allow my natural tendencies full reign.

Another tendency I have is to like things in my environment to be practical, user friendly and easy to clean. When I was introduced to my beautiful bedroom it had a lovely gold brocade bed cover with matching shams. “That looks cozy”, I thought, moments before the bed cover’s owner said “We don’t sleep with that”. Now, just keeping my mouth shut, I am thinking “Then why do we have it on my bed?” The place did look very nice though and I was happy to have found it. Later that day I put the “too fancy for me” bed cover into a closet in the spare bedroom and replaced it with a cozy user friendly quilt.

After having been here almost a week I began to wonder about the cleaning requirements of the beautiful white shag area rug on the floor of my bathroom. I flipped over a corner discovering that it was jute backed. “Oh oh!” I thought, “No washing machine for this rug!” There was a tag on another corner with cleaning instructions, or so I hoped. DO NOT DRY CLEAN. Plain enough, but what then? Is there a third option? The tag also said, Vacuum vigorously and spot clean stains immediately. That beautiful little rug now resides in a corner of the family room where it will never be stepped on by me.

These two small issues aside, I am 3 weeks into my first ever house-sitting gig and am more than completely happy with everything else.

The next few months may be quite uneventful but I will post if something interesting comes up.