Just one thing

Some days just one thing is actually enough. Yesterday was one of those days.

This was the thing.

Last year when I was doing my spring cleaning, the windows behind the bed were the only ones I did not wash. I just couldn’t be arsed to drag the bed far enough into the room to do the job. So yesterday this is where I began the annual window wash. (What? You wash your windows more than once a year? Get a life.)

Once I got the bed shifted and had a look at the wall under the window and the back of the bed I had to revise my opinion. Was it really only one year I skipped? Could that much dirt and dust be generated in only two years? Then I started washing the windows. Oh, my goodness, look at the colour of those paper towels. I suspect it wasn’t just last year I couldn’t be arsed to move the bed.

Never mind. The windows are clean now. At least on the inside. That’s the main problem with washing the windows in this house. The kitchen windows at the back are fine – you can wash them both inside and out. Sadly, not so with the rest of them. Washing the rest of them on the inside is just a reminder of how much they need a wash on the outside. Not something I can or would even consider attempting to do. It’s been ten years since the guys who would do it for fifty bucks moved off the island. The last time I asked someone for a quote it was over $100. In case you’re not up to speed here, I am a poor widow. Yes, I can rustle up a hundred bucks once a year to get the chimney swept, because I don’t want a chimney fire, but I do not have another hundred spare bucks lying around for window washers. (Actually, it’s been quite a while since I got that quote. It’s probably $200 now.) So, yes, other than the fleeting sense of satisfaction you get from washing the insides of the windows, all you really get from the job is the annual realisation of how much the outsides need to be washed. Oh, well.

Writing this has taken forever. Well, not the writing part. The getting the photo from my camera into the post part. Why? Because this Mac, which I wouldn’t exactly say I’m learning to like, but perhaps had stopped hating quite so much, would not recognise my camera plugged into the USB port. So I had to switch on the Toshiba, wait for it to slowly creak to life, download the photo from my camera, force quit the computer when it froze, reboot it when it came back on with fuzzy icons and then transfer the photo to a memory stick, which the Mac did deign to recognise.

As I said, just when I was starting to not hate the Mac quite as much. The week is nearly up. I know I cannot face going back to the slower than molasses Toshiba, but I wish so many people hadn’t lied to me. Macs are so easy, they said. Macs do everything for you, they claimed? Oh, yeah? Then why wouldn’t the fucking Mac recognise my camera? Grr.