*Go online to a paint company and continually swap out bathroom wall visualizations. You must find a color that is not yellow, is not white, has no hint of lavender in it, and is not brown. It must also look like sand on your favorite beach so that it matches the mini mermaids hanging on the wall.
*Read through the 1001 Muffins book and pick what you are going to make in two weeks when your current supply of breads and treats is down some. Hey, carbs are our friends because they make glucose, and glucose is keeping you going right now.
*Try on every pair of pants or jeans you have in your closet and decide which ones you can hold until you drop a size and can zip them, and which ones you should donate. For every donation, set five dollars of your own money aside in the special account you have for your vacation fund to Hawaii. Call your travel agent and book the flight.
*Re-organize your pantry so that you can see and remember what is actually available for a quick meal. Take a sharpie and write the month and year on the top of the lid of the 5 unexpired canned goods that remain. Open the can of apricots from 1999 to see what they look like...
*Change and launder the curtains in your rooms. Wash the dog saliva off the living room window because your "boy" stands on the back of the loveseat to bark at the squirrels in the back yard.
*Take a break with the dog. Scratch him under the chin until you can get him to say "arooo." Follow this with the verbal command, "Oh, So Scary!" until you can get him to do the ghost-noise on verbal command without the chin-scratching. (may take a few sessions.)
*Get on your hands and knees and wash the baseboards around each room of the house. Quietly pray the rosary to keep yourself from killing the cat who has put claw puncture-marks in one particular spot.
*Clean out all the cards that the missionaries from every country have ever sent you. You would not be able to use all these mass cards unless every person you have ever known in your entire life time x2 were to drop dead on the spot. Have a plan for all of the white envelopes left over. Trash the yellowed-ones or the ones with silhouettes of poinsettias.
*Revisit some of your favorite scrapbooks. Then when you find the three you haven't finished, spend an hour looking for pictures from the third litter of puppies that are most likely sitting on the dead cell phone in your kitchen drawer. (good luck with that). Give up and make yourself a bowl of cereal for supper.
*Look for a new dog online that costs under $1500. That will chew up about an hour of your time for the next six months.
*Stand in the middle of one room. Visualize which piece of furniture you want to move to another room in the house. Then, look at the clock. See how long it takes you to relocate that one piece. Caveat: you must displace an already existing piece of furniture in the next room to a third room. Keep going until every room has moved at least one piece of furniture. You are not done until you have changed the couch cover, and cleaned any floor or flat surface. If you time this exercise correctly, you will miss Wheel of Fortune or Jeopardy and be moving furniture long into the night. You will collapse onto your bed with a sigh of relief when you are completely done.
It is my hope that you have had a media/news-free day to clear your head of the fear and jargon. After you have done all of these activities above, you will be ready for another week of working at home. And hopefully your house will be more organized .... that elusive wish you used to say when you walked into your friend's place that was always immaculate. Now you know there are only three ways people can have spotless houses: they pay someone to clean FOR them; they don't live there long enough to make it dirty; or ... they have no life and all they do is clean!
No comments:
Post a Comment