Spring Cleaning and Christmas Decorating

It is a holiday here and much of the country has traveled to Senegal for a celebration of the birthday of Mohammed.  So, that means it is pretty quiet around our compound.  When it is quiet you have to take advantage of it.  For me, today started as a day to do my Christmas decorating (all of you posting pics on Facebook make me feel like I am way behind).  Well, as I looked around my home to decide where I was going to place the decorations I realized the house was filthy.  So, I set to “Spring” cleaning which included many trips up and down the ladder (trying to remember to gird my skirt each time so I didn’t fall when I stepped on it) to scrub all of the gecko poop off the walls and wash the inches of dirt off the walls as well as getting down big spider webs from the rafters and making some spiders pretty mad, knocking down ant and spider nests from the walls and then having to kill the critters that came out of those nests, washing drapes that were no longer white, an impromptu painting of my coffee table (thanks to the help of a teammate) and much more.  Now, 8 ½ hours later and absolutely exhausted I have decided to wait and put up the Christmas decorations tomorrow.  Pictures to come and there is no way in heck I would do Spring cleaning in Africa in the Spring time as I was hot enough today and it was only 85 degrees.