Scattered Thoughts

My children are on school vacation this week. Fortunately, or not so fortunately depending on your point of view… things where I work have been very slow lately so they closed the factory down for the week. Yeah!! I got a “free” vacation too. Of course mine was unpaid, but that’s another story for another day.

Anyway… while it’s great to have the kids home this week, I’ve also noticed an extreme decline in my computer time. Oh well… there are other things to do, right? Right???

So I’ve been sitting outside on the lawn chair and reading Iris Johansen and John Grisham novels, doing some yardwork and just relaxing. It’s been wonderful… but… I’d been feeling rather restless. I wasn’t sure what was going on until…

Something happened to me last night… I went to toss some papers into the recycling closet (we have a closet in our kitchen where we store/sort our recyclables) and the papers jumped back out at me. I guess it was time to make a trip to the recycling station.

Now my family and I are not the best at keeping things sorted so even though there are containers for each type of material, I still had to sort through everything to make sure it was in it’s proper pile. Thirty minutes later, and just as the rain was starting to fall, I headed out the door.

I thought that brief stint of cleaning would cure my burst of domestic energy but I was wrong. When I walked back into the kitchen upon my return I noticed a bunch of overripe bananas sitting on the table. We have an amazing recipe for Banana Chocolate Chip Cookies and I thought, “I guess I’ll make some cookies.”

But my kitchen was a mess… the counters needed to be cleared of clutter and wiped down, the floor needed to be swept and mopped, the sink needed to be emptied of dirty dishes and scrubbed. It was so dirty looking, I couldn’t even think of baking cookies with it in that condition.

So I started cleaning. I tackled the countertops and sink. I swept and hand scrubbed the floor. As I was cleaning I began to doubt that I’d feel like baking cookies when I was finished.

I was wrong. I felt energized!

I baked two batches of cookies, cleaned the mixing bowls, utensils and cookie sheets (typically I’d leave them in the sink until later), AND cleaned the living room while I waiting for each batch to bake.

When Gerry got home from work at 8:30 p.m. he walked into a clean home, freshly baked cookies, and the arms of a happy woman. I felt tremendous having accomplished so much in so little time. But I was focused, I took one task at a time, and I have to admit I enjoyed getting lost in the tasks and seeing the dramatic results of my hard work.

This morning I woke up feeling energized. My home is clean, the table is bare, and I am ready to take on the world.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 21st, 2005 at 9:28 am and is filed under Misc. Ramblings, Goal Setting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.