It’s finally looking and feeling like spring! You know what that means…

Yep, time to spruce things up inside and outside the house. It’s a good thing that the sunny, warmer weather seems to invigorate and energize me. I’m pumped and have several projects around the house already planned and some underway.

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At our house, never try to come out of the bathroom without washing your hands. We have our own hand washing police!

Yep, my youngest daughter has taken it upon herself to call you out if you happen to run out of the bathroom and she didn’t hear the the water running for at least a couple of choruses of the Happy Birthday song. I suppose it’s what you can expect when you grow up with a dad who is borderline obsessive about cleaning and disinfecting. Yep, their dad does most of the major cleaning around the house. I do what I call ‘maintenance’ otherwise known as just enough cleaning to keep things from being messy and downright unsanitary.

My area of expertise is to make sure they eat right and exercise. Their dad is the one who makes sure they’re not living in filth or ingesting/inhaling anything that could sabotage all my healthy living efforts. We call him the Lysol fiend!

If you’re a germ, don’t go near him if you don’t want to get zapped with the Lysol spray.

We make fun of him, but deep down, we also know he’s the reason the house is relatively sanitary and probably the reason that we don’t get sick as often as some people we know. With spring ready to burst upon us (as soon as winter’s last hurrah gets on with it already), spring cleaning and throwing open the windows are just around the corner.

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When I was in college and had a choice between used and new books, I almost always bought new unless the used book was pristine and unmarked. Before that, I didn’t have a choice. I just had to live through the scribbles and highlights of the previous textbook user. If their name was written on the bookplate, and I knew them, their reputation was taken down a notch in my mind. But after high school, I had a choice and I chose unblemished books.

I admit, I don’t like reading ‘dirty’ books. I like to keep mine as clean as possible. Because of that, I keep meticulous notes in a separate notebook. I am not obsessive about keeping a book clean, mind you. I’ve had lapses when I didn’t have anything else to write on and I just had to make a note on the margin or highlight a passage. The reason I didn’t like books that have been highlighted or marked up when I was in school was not due to any OCD tendencies either, I just didn’t want any spoilers. I want to see a passage and say to myself, ‘Wow! that’s highlight worthy!’ When something triggers a question or thought, I want to be the one to jot it down on my notebook or on the margin. I don’t want other people’s mark ups to influence how I understand or absorb or react to any book.

But I found, in the process of reading Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, that maybe there’s another way of looking at mark ups.

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Tomorrow is the first day of spring yet winter seems to be determined to put in its last hurrah. And just when I think I’ve gone through the whole season without as much as a cough, that itchy, scratchy feeling in my throat is slowly trying to take hold.

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