Sale Ends & Life Goes On

So, today was the last day of the August Sale, and was rather uneventful.  Which is fine, but almost funny, considering yesterday people were scrambling to get here and adopt.  No biggie though. 

Today was more relaxed.  Which is kind of nice, considering Monday is cleaning day.  For those that don't know, for maybe a month or two now, I've had a local guy come by to help clean on Mondays.  Everyone say hi to Joel (that's Jo-EL), since quite a few of you have met him when you've stopped by on Mondays.  He conveniently lives three blocks away and works at one of the local bars as a cook / cleaner... so fits right in with the cleaning I need done.

So anyway, he was cleaning some of the cages today, and after his cages were done (he does the ones with the pull out pans... everything else is on me), I opted to hang onto him for a bit more labor, and he sanded some stuff for me and then I showed him how to wash water bottles.  Yes, our water bottles do get washed, despite the way they always look.  Once a month.  Moreso, if a chin is sick or if the water bottle looks especially icky (then I'll swap it out with a clean one with new water), but since they are glass and don't breed bacteria the way plastic would, once a month typically suffices.  Well... it's the beginning of the month, and time to clean again.   So I showed Joel how I wash the bottles, and he was highly amused by the trial-mascara-brushes that I swipe from make-up-counters-at-the-mall to clean the water bottle tubes.  He cleaned maybe 15-20 before he had to leave (had already called his ride before he knew I wanted him to stay and work extra), and happily, he cleaned them as good as I would have.  If there's anything I hate, it's having to re-do something after help does it badly the first time (I hate doing double the work), but thankfully, he cleans and washes water bottles well.

When he was leaving, he made the comment of, how do I normally do this all by myself?  I just do.  I told him, even if he wasn't there, I'd just take down a few at a time, wash em, refill em, rehang them.  I use the katadyn filter to filter the water, and since it's not an endless supply, I told him, I'll do as many bottles as I can fill... then come back to it later.  Heck, even right now, when he left, I washed more bottles, and used all the water I had.  Refilled the filter, and came upstairs for a bit, took out recycling.  I wasn't originally going to go back down, but then I realized that I wanted to set out packages for pickup tonight, and I left a package to mail downstairs.  So, I will go back down and get that, and when I do, I'll take whatever water has filtered down in the bit of time I've been upstairs and fill and hang some more bottles.  And then fill the filter, and next time I'm down there, repeat.  It takes longer with just me doing it, but I get it done.  It's just a lot of time spent with the critters.