Ebony's Pearls

This was the garden as I had it prepared for winter, with a cardboard sheet to prevent weed growth and to kill off the weeds that snuck in last year.

This is the same side garden bed, almost complete. I need to put a decorative front on it and possibly some tall colorful plants in back. There's an African daisy bush and three gerbera daisies in it now.

Mind you, I did these gardens and yardwork in lieu of cleaning the kitchen that so desperately needs it.

I suppose tomorrow and possibly this evening I will do the inevitable and clean the kitchen.I wouldn't grinch about cleaning the kitchen so much except my daughter lives with me along with her two cats and their litter boxes are in the kitchen. She cleans those litter boxes out only when I become extremely angry and threaten to re-home her cats because she obviously doesn't love them enough to keep their litterboxes clean.

I hate walking or cooking in a kitchen that smells of days old cat box - and walking on the scattered litter bits. If there were anywhere else in the house to keep those cat boxes, I would set them there. But there's unfortunately not. The bathroom is so small there's not even room for one cat box, let alone the three we have set out.

It's not just the cat boxes, though. She has all of her professional kitchen equipment in there from when she was going to open a bakery or become a personal chef, plus her personal kitchen equipment, plus all of my kitchen gadgets (there's plenty of room for my things, but not all of hers and mine).

And then there's the fact that I am keeping 6 months' worth of food on hand, and because I can't get to the shelves I built for them (those cat boxes plus my daughter's gear, and now the under cabinet stuff I still haven't put away), that food is stacked on any available surface. I have a surprising amount of surface in my kitchen. Who knew?

So, like it or not, happy knees or not, I must clean the kitchen tomorrow. Not to my standards, but to good enough.