Carol’s Crazy Dream

Oh, I like things to be tidy all right. I just don’t like to take the time to make them that way. All this house cleaning and clutter control cuts into my Me Time. So, the question becomes, how do I make cleaning time more Me Friendly. I think bribery would work, because bribery always works with me. (Hey, at least I know myself.)

Today I’m going to think of rewards for myself. Fun things, yummy things, and slightly naughty things that I can give myself as rewards for doing my daily cleaning chores. Here are my ideas so far:

• Anything chocolate (I’ll stock up on Jell-o Sugar Free Chocolate Puddings and No-Pudge Fudge mixes)
• Allow myself to buy 6 pretty packets of flower seeds that I don’t have to plant if I don’t want to.
• Buy a tube of pop-up cinnamon rolls for breakfast.
• Buy an expensive bag of “wildlife” food along with the regular bird seed for our feeders.
• Go to the library and pick out a good book from one of my favorite authors to read.
• Better yet, find a good book to listen to!
• A dvd player for the bedroom so DH and I can spend weekend mornings in bed with plenty of entertainment.
• Buy a pretty new nightie to wear on our weekend mornings in bed.

This is fun. I think it’s working already!

My Friends, I have fallen of the tidiness wagon well and truly. Oh, I didn’t go on a non-cleaning binge or anything so dramatic. I let it get away from me piece by piece. Sometime this winter, I started skipping cleaning days. The system I’m following is meant to take care of skipped days every now and then, but I’ve skipped more than a few.

I’m not sure if merely sticking to the schedule will get the house all tidy again. It may be past the tipping point and a reasonable amount of cleaning each day won’t be able to bring it back. My plan is to draft saturdays into the action. I’ve always taken the weekends off, but now I’ll need several extra days to get caught up.

So, here I am at it again, blogging to keep myself on track. It’s good to be writing here again, but I wish it was under different circumstances!

Well, it’s been a while. I’ve been trying to decide whether to delete this blog or not because I haven’t had time to post. Time has always been a problem for me. I’ve never felt like I had enough time to do the things I want to do. Even as a kid I resented being pulled away from working on things I was doing to be forced to do mundane things, like eating and going to school. (School, I felt, was the biggest time waster of all.) And I really was working on projects, not just playing for fun’s sake. (I was a free spirit and a strange child.) I’m still like that. My creative ideas queue up and compel me to bring them into the world. If I don’t, the inner pressure they build is painful.

When I de-cluttered my home, something magical happened: I had to make a schedule! And, to my complete and utter surprise, scheduling worked. I was able to plan ahead and get things done on time!! Tentatively, I applied scheduling techniques to my huge backlog of creative ideas and it worked there, too! The anxiety I’d built up around my creative work died down because suddenly everything had it’s own place in my schedule. Each and every idea was tended to in it’s appointed time.

I haven’t been just laying about not posting these last few weeks, I’ve been applying the magic of scheduling to my entire life. And suddenly, miraculously, I have more time!! I’m still trying to figure out how imposing a schedule on myself enables me to be more of free spirit than I’ve ever been before, but it has. It’s one of those seemingly counter intuitive things that you have to feel your way through before you know it in your heart.

So, this blog is about to evolve. I’ve gone from de-cluttering my home to reorganizing my entire life, and I’d like this blog to reflect that. I’ve given the subtitle a new twist … from “home” to “life” … but my home is always going to be on the agenda because, frankly, I’m not that good at keeping it tidy yet!

Thanks for staying with me as this blog finds it’s legs.

Yesterday was tense. I almost fell off the wagon. I almost chucked the whole tidy house notion out the window. I’ve been working on a big project and taking time away from that to do the housework seemed wrong. Really wrong. The very idea made me angry! After all, some things are more important than a tidy house!

I worked on my project all morning and most of the afternoon. Afterward, it occurred to me that I could still do my cleaning routine. So, I did. Simple as that.

I got angry because when I’m working on a creative project I need to focus on it, and the un-done housecleaning routine kept popping into my mind and distracting me. After I devoted as much time to my project as I felt I needed to, I could tidy up with a calm mind.

My routine helps me tidy up in a logical and focused way, a little bit at a time, a little each day. But the routine needs to be flexible, too. Some days, I need to split it into tiny parts and fit it around something else that I’m tending to. Sometimes, I need to be able to say “not right now, this is more important”, and come back to it later.

The cleaning routine is supposed to help manage my life, not dictate how I live it. It’s simply a tool I use to make my life easier. It only becomes a bullying nuisance when I forget that.

A couple of weeks ago, I came down with the flu and the house fell apart. Well, in a couple of spots anyway. I’ve been following my daily cleaning schedule and my weekly Zone work since then and it’s worked! I’m shocked. I really am. The place is back in good order again.

So, I’ve learned two things:

1. A house cleaning schedule really does work and it doesn’t have to take up a ton of time.
2. A de-cluttered “base” makes keeping the house tidy, and recovering from reverses, easier.

Rationally, I’ve seen that these things are true because I’ve seen them work. Emotionally, I’m still afraid the whole house will explode into chaos again. I’m still a little afraid to let go and trust the process.

I know this is a bizarre subject to bring up first thing Monday morning, but this is when I clean my toilet. It’s a disgusting job, so I do it early in the morning before I’ve had my caffeine. I pour about a half a bottle of cleaner in the bowl and spray the whole area with 409 until the toilet and everything in the general vicinity is dripping. Then I go at it all with big handfuls of paper towels, use the brush on the bowl, and call it done. It’s kind of a shotgun approach to cleaning; hit it hard, fast, and without a lot of thought to aim. It works for me.

Okay, enough about that. Two more things and then I’ll quit. It took me several weeks to figure out that I need to keep a roll of paper towels in the bathroom, so you might want to think about that if you don’t do it already because it’s very handy. I found something that will actually take the yellow stain out of the bowl caused by our extremely hard water, too. It’s The Works Disinfectant Toilet Bowl Cleaner by HomeCare Labs.

If today is your Toilet Day, just get it over with anyway you can and know that I, your clean house comrade, am with you in spirit and salute you for a thankless job well done.

I think I used the cluttered state of my house to keep others away. It gave me an excuse to not open the door all the way when someone knocked. It gave me an excuse to never invite friends over, too.

Somewhere along the line, I cracked open. Instead of keeping people out, I want to let them in. I’m not sure if the de-cluttering came before or after that feeling emerged. Maybe they evolved together, hand in hand.

I’m not ready to host neighborhood get-togethers, but I am willing to have a few friends over. That’s enough for now, and I’m content.

Well, that’ll teach me to make promises. I really wanted to post here nearly everyday but fate intervened. I came down with a bad case of the flu this week and I’m just now able to sit upright and type coherent sentences! The place has fallen apart in places. Most noticeably, the kitchen and the area I was holed up in for the week. The kitchen wreck is all my husband’s doing. The mess around the bedroom is all mine. sigh.

I wobbled around the house and fixed some of it today, but it’s still less tidy than I want it to be. Now Flylady’s theory of starting where you are will be tested to the max. I’ll start working through my cleaning schedule again on Monday and see if the schedule brings about order … or not.

I take the weekends off in my schedule, by the way. It seems reasonable to me. Might have to reconsider that eventually. :)

We’ve invited some friends over Saturday and it’s been a long time since we’ve had guests. I’m cleaning house and I’m surprised to find that the house doesn’t need to be cleaned, it just needs to be straightened up. This is a new experience for me! I keep starting to panic about it, and then I look around and the place really don’t look that bad.

My daily cleaning schedule, combined with my weekly area work, seems to be keeping the place in a tidy condition. I don’t quite trust that it will last, though. The major decluttering as only been done for a couple of weeks and the newness hasn’t worn off yet. If I’m still able to keep the ball rolling after a month or so, then I’ll start to believe.

Now that I don’t have to clear off chairs for guests to sit in, I wonder if I’ll become a social butterfly. Hmmmm. Probably not. But it will be lovely to have our friends here, and that’s quite enough.

Yesterday, I tackled some areas that had been accumulating stuff since the de-cluttering project began. The “stuff” was mostly odd and ends that I wasn’t quite ready to throw away and had stashed away, saving the decision for another day.

I hate to throw away anything that reminds me of people, animals, and places that I love or have loved. It seems like objects carry a bit of that love in them somehow. I don’t want to throw away love or any representation of it! But, to keep in control of clutter accumulation, I have to let things go.

So I tackled a few last pockets of clutter yesterday, and it was easier to let things go now that I’ve had some practice with it. The small jar without a lid that reminded me of the time I wanted to try canning my own fruit preserves and my mother-in-law gave me some of her own canning equipment, went out in the trash. That is a sweet memory, and I don’t need a jar to remind me of it. And the love stayed right in my heart and in my memories, where it was all along.