Easter weekend and more..

Another Easter has passed. This year, for a change, we went to the country house of my in-laws. Every year we eat the Easter lunch with them, so the only change was the change of house. I have other plans for next year though ;-)

Anyway, it was nice. We were lucky with the weather, quite sunny and pleasantly warm on Sunday, little bit misty yesterday. Sunday morning me and my daughter went out in the garden (I call it for simplicity as garden; it is a big piece of land with olive trees and in a corner my father-in-law grows also potatoes and some other vegetables). We played football first, then we went all around the land collecting flowers. There were many different flowers mostly in different shades of violet. When we came back to the house our shoes and trousers were all wet because of the morning dew on the grass.

Me and the kids spent two lazy days, lying on the sofas watching TV, playing cards, going for a walk around the house, sleeping, reading, eating, whereas Gabriele and his father had to work in the garden cutting wood, removing the cut branches of the olive trees, preparing the grill.

In Italy when people get together for any reason, Easter - Xmas - new years' eve - birthdays - celebrations of any kind, they EAT. They like having their visitors around dining table instead of serving them only a cup of coffee and some sweets in the living room... So we also ate this weekend, lamp - the classical Easter meat-, but also chicken and pork. I had made a pineapple cake as the dessert of our Easter lunch, they loved it. I had also prepared a sweet Easter bread (paskalya çöreği in Turkish). Though I made it for the first time in my life it turned out quite delicious and we ate it not only at breakfast time with our coffee but also dipped it in our Vin Santo after dinner.

Today I am at home with the two kids. Iris' school doesn't open before Thursday. I am planning to go downtown and visit a Spanish friend of mine in the afternoon. She just had her second daughter a couple of weeks ago. Maybe we take all our four kids and go out to a park, we will see.

I should do something about finding a job soon. I am becoming (or am I already???) a housewife and I don't like this (no offense to real housewives, the ones who have chosen to be only housewives, but I wasn't planning to become one, so it is unacceptable for me)!!!

The "Bree" in me, Part 2

I told the cleaning lady to vacuum-clean the mattresses of our beds last week. She said 'Sure, I do it from time to time, I can do it also today'. Great. I was in the kitchen, as always, while she was doing the cleaning. I noticed that she didn't go to the storage room where we have the stuff for cleaning and the different pieces of the vacuum cleaner, but I heard the vacuuming in our bedroom.
- She is not vacuuming the mattress with the piece for the floors, is she?
I found myself thinking... Then I waived that question off saying to myself that any person able to use her brain a little bit would not do something so stupid. Well, she turned out to be not one of those people. I found it out on Monday when I told her to vacuum the sofas in the living room with the little piece of the vacuum-cleaner which is made for that purpose, and adding: 'You used that piece to clean our mattresses as well, right?'. The answer was 'No'.

You cannot clean the dust and dog-hair and food rests and whatever else is on the floor with one brush and then use the same brush to clean the mattress that you sleep on for God's sake! This is not cleaning but dirtying the place that you lie down. If I enjoyed sleeping with all the dust of the house I would sleep on the floor.

Yes, I am a cleanliness freak, I accept that. When I go out in one of my balconies I either use some other slippers that are to be used only in that balcony, or clean under my slippers before getting in the house again. I have all kinds of detergents for each bathroom, the kitchen, the refrigerator, the floors etc. The list can be made longer, but enough of that.

However, I think that being a person of order and system is not something so bad after all. For example, I am extremely precise in whatever it is that I do, be it a knitting job or a software that I write. I would sit at my computer for hours in order to make my little piece of program code perfect, or take down a knitting project just for correcting one single loop knitted wrong many lines before, though nobody else but me would recognize the mistake. You can always be sure that you would get my best if I have said that I would do something for you. And this is not bad, is it? :-)