This week (December 22-26), I’m giving you a Christmas gift. If you’re one of the people who reads this blog and hasn’t gotten a copy of Baker’s Dozen, now’s your chance to grab a free one on your Kindle. Just click this link and grab the book from Amazon. And if you like the book, please don’t forget to leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads.

For several years I’ve been using the same cleaning service at my house. They come monthly, which is quite often enough. Their prices have gone up a bit, though I haven’t minded. 

But I think it’s time for me to find some new cleaners. 

Every month, the cleaners do something weird. They organize my bathroom counter in a different way; they put my dishes into strange cabinets; they take all the water bottles out of the packaging and line them up neatly on the drinks table. 

That last one was the weirdest thing they’d done in a while, at least until this month. This month:

1. They ate some chocolate that I happened to have left out (in a ziploc bag, to prevent ants from getting to it) which I was saving for someone to try. I thought initially it was Partner 2 (which would have been fine if she’d wanted to try some) but she said it wasn’t her. And I don’t sleepwalk or sleep-eat. So it had to be the cleaners. 
2. They absconded with my dish soap bottle. Not the big refill jug I keep in the laundry room, but the little bottle that lives on the lip of my kitchen sink. Like, why would you do that? 
3. They put the spanking implements I left out on the dresser into the toy bag — which they’ve never done before; usually they just clean around them. 
4. They put puzzle pieces into a light fixture. 

That last one is by far the weirdest of all. Usually they’ll move one of the lamps in my living room so they can plug in the vacuum (although there is another plug less than five feet away which is easy to get to so I don’t know why they don’t just use that one). This month, they must have knocked over an open box with puzzle pieces in it that sits on my bookshelf — it’s my daughter’s, so I should probably put it in her room, but puzzles are generally done on the game table in my living room so I’m fine with it being there. Anyway, I happened to notice that the lamp was moved, so I moved it back, and as I did I saw something inside the cup part of the fixture. 

That’s the kind of lamp it is, by the way. 

There were puzzle pieces inside the cups. All of the cups. 

Why? Why would you do that? What possible purpose could it serve? And there’s a box right there on the shelf that says “1001 Pooping Puppies Puzzle”. I realize they are Brazilian and don’t speak a lot of English, but even if they couldn’t translate the word “puzzle” they at least have to know what a puzzle is and that the pieces don’t go in the light fixture. 

I’d really like to know what these people are thinking when they do some of the things they do. 

Oh, and yes, I could clean my own house. I’m certainly capable. But it’s worth the money to me to have someone do it who does it for a living and is way better at it than me. And they can do it way faster than I can. I’d rather not spend four to six hours cleaning my house in a haphazard fashion, thank you very much.