Persnickety...

 

Every once in a great while I have the outside of my windows professionally cleaned. I am persnickety about windows in general.  I have no problem keeping the inside all sparkly, but dragging a ladder around outside and the ups and downs that entails is not fun… or a good idea at this stage of the game. As for that ladder -- I once spent an entire year looking for it. It turned up missing shortly after I missed the bottom step and found myself on the floor of the garage taking inventory of every bone in my body. I accused both my children and their spouses of hiding it from me. Good thing they have good senses of humor and are kind and patient.  I found the ladder in my barn - eventually.  I sort of remember putting it there, but have no idea what I was thinking when I did that. It might have been related to that episode in the garage when doing windows. That would make sense. I sometimes do.

Anyway …  I had the windows done this past week and this may be a record – it did not rain immediately after as is usually does. The rains that hit the windows enough to spot them came three days later… a new record in the duration of exterior window cleanliness.

If, by the way, you still do the outside of your windows yourself, I discovered by experimenting on a whim one time, that if you put windshield washer “stuff” into a spray bottle, it works exceedingly well to eliminate all grit and spots on the outside of windows. The rain-x variety will actually keep windows from spotting. I do not recommend it for inside as it smells like something that you want to hold your breath while using. 

So … as we in Northwest Pennsylvania begin to batten down the hatches in preparation for the long winter months, I have checked the windows off the list. Some may suggest that it would have been smarter to wait until Spring, but around here, one tends to look outside from inside for a lot of months in a row.  Who really cares about clean windows in the nice weather of the summer which only lasts a couple of months anyway. Not me. Summer here is a very brief time period, a short number of days and …  I am, most often, not inside to look out or to even notice window “sparkliness".