Clean House...Messiest House in the Country!

This morning I spent a couple of hours in my real kitchen, cleaning. All the time I was doing it, Tessie was rattling on about how nice it would be to have the tea shop finished so that we could start on Spiderwort Manor. I thought that she had given up on that for the time being. no such luck. I started being suspicious when she went on and on about not having enough room in her cottage...

I finished the dishes and put a chicken in the oven to roast and then I got out the kitchen ladder and climbed high up to where Tessie's house is perched. Usually only the front of the house shows, so when I turned it around, Tessie tried to thwart me.

What I saw was a shock. She has been stowing stuff inside willy-nilly. No rhyme or reason. She couldn't even get the front door open and poor Spike was sitting inside his canopy bed. It was laying on it's side. No wonder he wanted a new place to sleep.

I immediately got on her case and told her that, if she didn't clean it up right now, I was never going to even start Spiderwort Manor.

That seemed to work. She started on the ground floor and worked her way to the top.

When she moved up to the second floor, I spied Zar worming his way into the ground floor. He made himself a Manhattan, picked up Tessie's copy of "The Witch's Handbook" and settled into a cozy chair by the stove. Silly man.

Everybody knows that you never touch a witch's personal copy of the handbook. Each one is individually tailored to it's owner. She sensed it as soon as he did it.

She bided her time and finished her cleaning upstairs.....No wait. There are no stairs, so I guess I should say on the second floor.

When she finished her tasks, she calmly picked up a wand that was laying on the bed, pointed it through the floor to where Zar was ensconced and waved it in a figure 8.

I watched and waited with interest. The first thing I knew, Tessie was nestled in the chair where Zar had previously been getting ready to read her handbook.

She now has the handbook and her wand. And Zar? He looks, for all the world, like a faithful man servant. He is obediently serving her a cold plate for lunch and refilling her iced tea. He patiently waits until she tells him the next thing that she wants done.

She just now told me that she made a big mistake. She said, "I should have waved the wand earlier. I wouldn't have had to do all that cleaning.....He could have done it....." She was deep in thought for a couple of minutes. Then she added with a wicked grin,"Hey! I forgot to get down on hands and knees and scrub the floor! Zar! Get the bucket and the brush and get to work." Then back to me, she said, "He'll learn! It may take a while, but he will learn."

The last time I looked in, Zar was going over the floor in front of the stove for the third time and Tessie was happily drinking tea and memorizing new spells.

Back to wicker work. See you tomorrow.