Recently my husband Dave has been inviting guests to come and see our bathrooms soon after they arrive. “Just look at those floors,” he will say. Most guests are puzzled particularly if they have been to our home before. “Did you change the flooring?” they will ask. “It kind of looks the same.” At this point, I usually intervene. “Dave washed the bathroom floor and he wants you to notice what a great job he did.”
In December we did some minor renovations to our two bathrooms. New toilets, new hardware and newly painted cabinet doors. I also wanted to replace the flooring which readily shows any speck of dirt and needs to be swept or washed far more often than I like to do it. However, after consulting with a friend who is a flooring expert, Dave decided taking out our old tiles and putting in new ones would be far too difficult and costly. So he made me a counter offer. “How about from now on I wash the bathroom floors?”
I accepted without hesitation. After some forty years of cleaning bathroom floors I was ready to turn the task over to someone else. And not only does Dave clean the floors of our bathrooms he has taken to doing all the other cleaning in the bathrooms as well. I am thrilled! Knowing he will take care of that loathsome task makes the rest of my housecleaning less onerous and dreaded for me.
If having my own personal bathroom cleaner means our guests will be treated to a bathroom viewing at the start of their visits I can certainly live with that.
Other posts……….
The video was made by Dr. James Tanton a Princeton graduate who grew up in Adelaide, Australia and is currently the Mathematician in Residence at the Mathematical Association of America in Washington D.C. Turns out 
Watching the process that way worked for me too! In no time at all I had folded a fitted sheet properly for the first time! Thanks Dr. Tanton!
It was neat to view the city from the river perspective especially all the grand homes along the banks. We saw deer and pelicans and herons and signs of beavers at work. People were so friendly- saying hello, reminding us to drink water, commenting on our paddling strokes, waving and shouting greetings to us from bridges. 
During the first half of our journey the river was very shallow and we went aground a couple of times on sandbars that extended on for quite a distance. 
At one point when Millie and I couldn’t seem to free ourselves from a sandbar a kindly gentleman who lived along the water donned his hip waders and came out to help us, showing us the channel of deeper water where we could get through. 
We stopped for lunch at Omands Creek Park. Millie had made delicious cheese and vegetable biscuits and brought along some of her homemade spicy pickles from this year’s batch. Mostly though we just drank and drank- plenty of water and a little beer. I hadn’t brought along a water bottle which was silly and I was actually a mite dizzy when we got out of the canoes at lunchtime. 
It was 36 degrees on Saturday but during most of our journey we had a little bit of a breeze to cool us. For the second half of our paddle the river was much deeper, but the current was a little harder to navigate and we encountered some larger boats that created waves for our canoes. 
The distance from Ed and Millie’s house to ours is 15 kilometers as the crow flies so I am thinking we probably paddled at least 20 or more kilometers along our winding river route. 
Once we reached the dock on Waterfront Drive we loaded up the canoes one by one and returned them and then we went back to Ed and Millie’s. 
Dave and Ed took a dip in the Assiniboine to refresh themselves. 
Then we had appetizers and drinks down by the river in Ed and Millie’s lush and lovely back yard. 
A marvelous meal of barbecued pork, kale salad and fresh garden vegetables followed and it was dark before we headed inside for a piece of Millie’s delicious homemade apple pie and ice-cream and a last glass of wine. 
I went on a field trip last week with a group of women from my church. We all volunteer at the Selkirk MCC Thrift Store together. Marj is our leader. Her weekly news reports via e-mail keep us in touch with each other. That way even if we miss a week of volunteering we still know what’s going on with the others in our group. 
First stop of course was another Thrift Shop. This one in Morris. 
A staff member who originally hailed from Newfoundland gladly took us ‘behind the scenes’ to get a better idea of how the place worked. 
We checked out their slick price marking system. 
And took note of how they organized things that came in as donations. 
We poked around the aisles looking for bargains and….
even tried on a mink stole that was for sale. 
Then it was time to head for the Jasmine Tea Room in Altona. We were in two different vehicles and each car took a bit of a detour through the town, since both drivers had Altona roots and wanted to show us sites that had been important to them when they had lived in Altona. 
Our lunch at the Jasmine Tea Room was delicious and since we finished eating a little early……
we headed off to Altona’s Gallery in the Park 
The store staff was ever so nice to us and gave us a tour of their facilities. 
We marveled at the beautiful quilt room where material is saved and cut and sewn and stitched by many groups of volunteers. Then the quilts are displayed and sold.
On the way home we made a stop in Neubergthal, a Canadian historic site where homes and other buildings, are maintained as they might have been in a traditional Mennonite village. Here we pose on the driveway of a home that belongs to fellow members at Bethel Mennonite Church. 
