Well. We’ve survived the first couple of days back in the real world for the most part. However, full disclosure, I had a moment yesterday morning when the alarm went off and I immediately began to think about how long it will be until the next morning when we can sleep in and wanted to cry when I realized it’s at least ten days away.
I’ve spent most of my time catching up on everything I didn’t do over the Christmas vacation. My email inbox was embarrassingly full and my refrigerator was embarrassingly empty. So I’ve slowly begun to tackle email and made a trip to HEB to stock up on all the groceries our life requires. Normally I start the new year with all manner of healthy eating resolutions, but I’m just not feeling it right now. Although I did buy both spinach and kale to hopefully offset the Sour Patch Kids and Hot Tamales. I think maybe this year I feel like survival is key for the first week back and I’ll work on being a better person starting next week. Baby steps.
I also don’t know if I’ve mentioned this, but I just signed on to write a fourth book and it’s due in June. For those of you who are gifted in calendar math, you will quickly realize that June isn’t nearly as far away as it may seem right now and maybe I should start thinking about writing some words for that bad boy. Which is what I’ve attempted to do this week but I always have to write sixty-four things I hate before I stumble upon one thing I can actually tolerate.
There’s also nothing like a looming book deadline to make me feel like it is extremely important for me to clean out every room and closet in my house. I even found a chart on Pinterest that gives you a clean out assignment every day for forty days. This is great in theory, but I am a binge cleaner. I couldn’t possibly sustain the drive or the energy to clean out a section of my house every day for forty days. This is also the reason I’ll never run a marathon. Some things in life are much better as a sprint. (Hypothetically speaking. In reality I prefer not to run sprints or marathons because RUNNING.)
So I may have to tackle a few closets and drawers just for my peace of mind. I realize I need to write a book but there is really nothing that makes me feel more accomplished than cleaning out a whole box of stuff from a closet, especially when I finally commit to getting rid of something that I’ve held on to for way too long.
Speaking of, I have kept all manner of old DVDs even though we don’t even have a DVD player anymore. But I look at those Baby Einstein DVDs and The Little Mermaid and Shrek and I can’t help but remember how they were such a vital part of Caroline’s toddlerhood. (Not that I let her watch that much T.V. This was only during the downtime that we weren’t reading together from War and Peace and eating organic baby food I made from scratch.) However, they are taking up room that could be used for something we actually use. I’m so conflicted.
And we also have a cabinet in our dining room which is where craft supplies go to die. I’m not sure how it became our designated craft cabinet, but it is chock full of glitter sticker letters, pom pons, googly eyes and packs of construction paper. I’ve thought about cleaning it out before but I get scared when I open it and quickly shut the door again and pretend it was all a bad Martha Stewart dream.
Anyway, the fact that I’m discussing the contents of various closets and cabinets in my home is a sure sign that there just isn’t much going on around here except pure procrastination. Maybe tomorrow I’ll actually clean a bunch of stuff out just to get it over with so I can focus on more important things.
Like organizing my spice rack.
And scrubbing my baseboards.
Or checking to see if Gwen Stefani and Blake Shelton are still a thing.