"Spring" Cleaning

Today I got umption in my gumption to clean the house on this holiday. Inspired by the arrival of guests in a few days, I decided to get a lot of the chores done around here that were piling up. The day was brilliantly interuppted by calls from quite a few family members, which was a lovely distraction.

Now I am going to list all of my accomplishments, not to brag, but more so to encourage myself with the daunting list of everything else left to do!

- Got wood at Home Depot to cover the hold in our sewing table, spray painted it black, so now it looks nice
- Spray painted a bulletin board from church to see if that looked nice. It does! Just have to figure out how to get paint in the crack.
- took down the tree and all Christmas decorations
- cleaned off balcony, including throwing out old plants, cleaning out our poor dying vermicomposter (sorry guys, can't have you and your odd flies in the house this year), and sweeping it all up.
- cleaned and organized the craft area
- Did a lot of dishes
- vacuumed the house
- began - and nigh completed - going through our memorabilia in the office to make it look less like one big ginormous pile.
- made a grocery list.
- miraculously cooked dinner
- got some good storage boxes from office depot
- got our Colorku board all set up in a safe place.
- put our vacuum cleaner together after having to clean it out thoroughly
- Oh! Laundry! We did some of that too.


Sounds pretty good! Here's what's left:
- Discovered 3 boxes of *stuff* left over from graduate school and who knows what, including office supplies and piles of paper.
- Jon needs to finish a huge pile of memorabilia (consequence of having an organized wife - the bachelor boxes of stuff no longer cut it!)
- Sara needs to clean off all the stuff on her desk that she found during this process and needs to find a home for.
- Figure out a way to improve the bulletin boards
- Grocery shop - having food would be very very nice.

Now if you have read my to-do list thus far, impressive! It was nice to have a day away from the computer and feeling relieved about some of the necessary accomplishments around here. Now here's to the next holiday, when we can finish a lot of it up!

Vermicomposting

Today Jon and I bravely "harvested" our vermicomposter. Usually typical vermicomposters have several layers to them, so you can easily harvest the good compost from the composter as the worms go through the layers. You just take the bottom layer off, which has the rich stuff, and meanwhile the worms have already moved up to the next layer and are continuing their wonderful work.

Unfortunately all our worms live in one layer - a kitty litter box, now full of former-food, soil, and newspaper. They are very happily working away at all our scraps, however it was beginning to get full. To harvest the good compost in this situation, you have to dump all the contents of the composter onto a tarp! Yes, worm dirt, worms, rotting food, and all. Now it had been awhile since we had put new scraps in the vermicomposter, so we didn't see too many food scraps (excepting some eggs shells we put back there MONTHS ago. Worms don't like them, but they sure filled them with compost too!). We did however see lots of worms! They are busy in there. Once we got it all dumped onto the tarp (took awhile as it was pretty packed in), the worms seemed in a bit of a state of shock. Soon they were climbing away from the light into their dark heap of moisty dirtiness, and then we removed the rich compost from the sides of the mound. This took quite awhile.

I was surprised how fun it was. Now, we certainly looked odd, bent over a tarp of dirty and worms on our cement balcony in the suburbs, with our head-lamps on our head to shed more light on the mound to get the worms to move inward. However, it felt so much like childhood, playing the dirty, moving squilly worms around, working on a project.... it was just fun and a new experience.

We removed a huge bowl full of fresh compost, dropped the worms and their former work back into their bin, and put a heaping load more of our scraps into the worm bin. I'm excited to see their work again - it's always fascinating how quickly they move through so much food - and hoping the compost will help our plants grow a little bit. However if you are in our area- we have enough good compost to go around!