Or is it the other way round?
Seems to work both ways for me, but this week, I am especially noticing the correlation between the uncluttered house and the surge of productivity I’ve experienced the last two days.
Since the house fire last year, cleaning the house is not nearly the chore it used to be (and I would hope not! We don’t have NEAR the “stuff” we used to.) However, even with many more “clean horizontal surfaces” than I’ve ever enjoyed in my life, every now and then, a Saturday spent cleaning is warranted.
And so this past Saturday was spent.
I didn’t get a whole heck of a lot done on Sunday, though now that it’s almost football season, for real, I’ll worry about that even less (I have always tried to reserve Sunday as a ‘no work’ day – don’t always make it, but I try, nonetheless.) And this Sunday was topped off rather nicely with my Steelers winning! (Yes, I’m a diehard Steeler fan living in rabid Cowboy country – UGH! But everyone must have a challenge or two, and from August to February, that is one of my bigger ones…)
However, come Monday morning, got the kids off to school and I was like a dynamo on this laptop, I’m tellin’ ya! Stuff is just POURING out of me, like I’ve turned on some kind of Divine garden hose! It’s freakin’ awesome! (I guess some call it being in ‘flow’…ok, I can deal with that, too, though thanks to my OB/GYN, it sounds too much like something menstrual.)
Anyway…
I was up until 3am this morning (Tuesday), went to bed, got back up at 5:45, got an hour or so in before rousing the kids and getting them off to school and then a solid 4 hours this morning. Tickin’ things off the to-do list like nobody’s business!
I looked up and realized a) I was at a good break point, b) I could use a break and I was hungry, so c) I went to Prima-Donna-Daughter’s school and had lunch with her. I love surprising her like that, because she loves it so much when I do. She’s in the 3rd grade this year, and thankfully (awesomely) she is still thrilled to see me, claim me, talk to me, and brag on me in front of her peers. That’ll change sooner than I care for, so I’m enjoying the crap out of it now. (Too bad I’m not nearly as stellar in her eyes here at home…sniff sniff…) And the chicken tettrazini that was lunch was GREAT – AND only $2.25 including a chocolate milk (a treat I reserve for eating lunch at school.)
Came back here – knocked off a few more to-dos – looked up and she was coming in the door. I had promised today would be library day, so we went and did that, stopped by BabySis’ to pick up PDD’s uniform pants she had hemmed for me (BabySis is an EXCELLENT seamstress, btw), stopped and filled up the car, got milk for in the morning and came back home to figure out what would be dinner. (These kids of mine are always in jeopardy of fending for themselves if I’ve had lunch with either one of them during the day because cooking is not my favorite activity and I’m even less inclined if I haven’t starved myself all day long.)
Realized it was time to pick up Second Son from football practice, so I put off the dinner decision until I saw what kind of shape he was in. It hit 97 today, and two hours on a football field kinda kills your appetite, so I might be able to escape cooking after all. Might be leftovers for PDD, after all.
He was about to puke (literally) and cramped up something fierce and all he wanted was a shower and his bed. By the time we got home (10 mins, max), the A/C in the car had cooled him down to coherency (is that a word?), but he wasn’t interested in eating, so no cooking req’d for me – YAY! Quickly reheated leftovers for PDD and back here I came.
By this time it’s 6:30pm and I’ve got 2 and a half hours until a conference call I was holding, and I still needed to get a sales page written, coded and up on the site, and I knew I really only had about an hour or so, because PDD would need marshaling to bed and a story. (She reads to ME sometimes, now…way cool.)
Got the sales page done and put up in the nick of time. Got PDD pajama’d and storied and tucked and hopped on the call and proceeded to “pour out” WAY more content than I had planned for this first of two calls – hung up almost two hours later, whipped, but grinning.
Got sucked into email for an hour or so, blog reading for another hour or so, started writing this and now it’s almost 1am. I SWEAR to you I wasn’t tired until I took a potty break a few mins ago and saw than Second Son had WRECKED the bathroom showering before bed. The mess sucked the life right out of me. Damn.
Maybe Hump Day will have to be a mini-repeat of Saturday to get me back in the groove. I didn’t realize how much I like an uncluttered house until I got one. It’ll be a year in October that we’ve been back home, and damn if I don’t (or care to) remember the Cluttered House. And now, how it irks me to put up with things being out of place, left around, chunked in the corner, or left on the floor.
My mind has cluttered at the sight of the bathroom, so I guess I’ll deal with that (with his assistance before school) in the morning. PDD escapes my ire this time. Wonder if she’ll appreciate it…
