Scrub-a-dub-dub, I'd rather be with 3 men in a tub

This blog, for now, isn't called "start exercising" but rather "start moving." The idea that action is better than nonaction. And action can be anything: dancing, sex, water skiing, breaking in a wild horse, cleaning your bathroom floor when you've neglected it for a month. Not that I would know anything about that.  For me this past weekend it meant power washing the house. I know initially that doesn't evoke an image of a strenuous workout but throw in some hard-to-remove hard water stains on painted aluminum siding and then the heart rate starts rising.

This picture gives you an idea of how nasty the hard water stains were on a portion of the house. Granted, this section was probably one of the worst two. Notice the two clean panels in the middle of the rust stains? I did those to give a comparison for the picture. Each panel probably took five minutes of scrubbing, which doesn't sound like much, but please. PUH-LEEZE! If you think that sounds like a picnic, suck it. Take five minutes and times it by the width of those sections and the amount of house we've got and let me tell you ... I'm surprised my arms even work anymore!

I know power washing isn't done by the elite. Have you seen the people who do this for a living? Yes, average people. They aren't body builders or or scientists in lab coats.  Eventually I sort of figured out a system. I'd drench the siding in the cleaning solution, let it sit and scrub that solution in, rinse, scrub, rinse again. One 36-inch board probably took a solid 25 minutes of vigorous determination and lots of cussing. Not to mention all the tripping and kicking I did as I tried to maneuver around the power washer. This machine is like a small alien. There's the water supply that connects to the house on one side of the house. There's the cord that connects to the power supply on the other side of the house, of course it's on the other side of the house. There's the  "lance" with the tubing that connects to the gun and into the bottle of cleaning solution. You have to alternate between the lance and the gun depending on if you're spraying pure water or the cleaning solution. Are you annoyed about the process while you only have to read about the details?

I guess I didn't know what  I was getting into. I thought it would require a sense of "work" but I didn't realize it'd require a sense of mind numbing tediousness with a lack of an astonishing, completed visual component. I hate the color of our house. In fact Jason and I both do. Unfortunately I think I was disappointed in my labors because I thought once it was cleaned, I'd feel like I had a shiny, new house. Nope. Not so. I have a house with clean siding but it's still the same lackluster paint color it always was. It's just less dirty. Wow. The joy.

In three hours I only managed to wash the back side of the house. The other sides are going to be just as cumbersome since the power cord and the hose are going to have to stretch halfway around the world to bring that alien machine out of the backyard. However, I am going to have to suck it up and finish this job. I don't want to battle the machine any longer than I have to. Plus I'm tired of tripping over it in the dining room where it sits mocking me to drag it out into the sunshine and rev it up.

But hey, at least I'm burning calories, right? At least I am moving, after all. Bah humbug. The joy doesn't go that deep.