Mondays are generally not my best days and Monday mornings are usually the worst. It’s because when it’s the weekend, I usually slide back into my natural rhythm and by the time it’s Sunday evening, I’m not really tired, yet duty calls the next morning, so you have to go to bed at a “responsible adult” time. But this morning, well, it was not quite what I had expected it to be at all.

Every morning when I wake up I always do a “clean sweep” of the house. We have five lovely cats, but there’s rarely a night that goes by without them making a mess somewhere. And our clan eldest Mysty is suffering from kidney failure and she’s decided that she is no longer required to go on the litter box. Thankfully she does always use the same spot, so it’s easy to clean her little mess. After all that cleaning, I proceed with the rest of my morning routine, which involves meditation, reading non-fiction and journaling. But that routine was disturbed this morning in a way that was unprecedented.

At some point Bren entered the kitchen and I was just minding my own business, making coffee. Then she asked me, “What’s that one the trash can?” and all I could see were small specks on the top and my response was “Looks like coffee to me.”
“Coffee doesn’t look red, or move!” Bren said, after which she raised her voice into an “Aaah” and fled to the living room.

In my defence, doesn’t this look the slightest bit like spilled used coffee from a distance? 😛

I moved to the trash can and then I saw what it was… Aphids. Loads of them! Then I recalled that yesterday we had pulled out our radish plants, because they were blocking the sunlight from the rest of the plants, but we had never bothered to look for any creepy crawlers.

So, there I was, taking the trash out as fast as I could and then putting the can under our shower to clean it completely. Shortly after I was finished doing all that Bren cleaned the entire house and that’s how our week started. Off to a shining start!

Have a nice week all!

~Jeffrey