clean for 30 minutes for 30 days

Sometimes it seems the minute I come up with a really good plan, that’s the moment my life stops entirely and I make no development at all in that area.

My plan of six daily “periods” to focus on is BRILLIANT! I love it. But I haven’t done a damned thing with it since I thought of it.

Almost every day since then, I’ve slept in until 9 or 10am, rather than waking up at 4 or 5 like I should have. I’ve let my son get himself up and ready and off to school all by himself, instead of playing “the good mother” and getting my own day started at the same time, and cooking him a hot breakfast, etc. I know he’s fine taking care of himself, but I don’t admire the me that leaves him to it as much as I would admire the me that got out of bed and acted more involved.

I can’t seem to control my sleep. I feel the need either to sleep tremendously too much (10-12 hours of comatose unresponsiveness) or not sleep at all (3-4 hrs of fitful half-rest).

I’m having a LOT of resistance to leaving the house, unless there is an actual friend at my door coming to take me somewhere, such as choir practice, or a day of shopping. I can’t seem to make myself do anything BY myself. Inside I feel like whining all the time, wishing someone would hold my hand literally, and be with me and make everything better instead of having all this responsibility alone and being such a worthless failure.

This isn’t productive. I can’t spend all my time beating myself up. Some things are getting done every day, even if it isn’t what I think of as “enough” to justify myself as “worthy”. My kids are fed and clothed. My house is functionally clean, even if not pretty. My obligations to friends are being met. Just because I could/should be doing ten times as much doesn’t mean that what I AM doing is nothing.

I read once of a cure for bedwetting that involved TELLING the child to wet the bed. If they were going to do it anyway, make it a choice. Do it on purpose. Choose to do what you’re doing anyway. And then it becomes nearly impossible to do. Maybe I should find out what the hell I’m really doing, and then CHOOSE to do that.
9am: wake and surf the internet for three hours
noon: shower, if you feel like it because your feet are cold. Otherwise, stay grungy.
3pm: meet kids coming home. Feel very guilty that they’ve worked all day doing THEIR thing, and you’ve only done internetty stuff rather than any housecleaning. Try to get them to do a chore, and call it “management”.

Damn. When I look at it that way it makes me so ashamed. I’m not sure it makes a difference that I am ashamed. But it certainly isn’t a pretty picture.

I’m trying to get up the gumption to leave the house now. The weather is pretty for the first time in a week. I don’t have a migraine. I’ve taken a shower. All I need to do is put on shoes and “outside” clothes, and gather bags etc. and GO.

God, I have such an urge to just surf the internet some more. Maybe I’ll find more videos on how to make doll houses. Maybe I’ll take a nap. Maybe I’ll write more posts or comments here, and pretend that that means I’m being “connected” to people. ARGH!! I know nothing matters now except moving and getting out of here!!!! I feel like my legs are stuck in tar, and I cannot move.

I’ll see if I can break the inertia. It’s pull is strong. I hope I can escape it. Insert some reference here to the gravitational pull of a galactic object and warp thrusters trying to save the Enterprise from falling into its field forever. ARgh. I’m such a loser. I have to get off the computer now.

This goal bugs me. I should have been able to do this. Somehow I feel like I have been doing plenty of work all along, but the real goal behind this goal was to get my house tidy and presentable and keep it that way. That hasn’t happened. We’re still rolling along the edge of “functional”, but not anything we’d want to show to company.

Maybe I made a mistake to try to organize my time so specifically before. My life is full of variables, and when I have an hourly schedule and I miss a deadline, I feel like the whole day is shot. I’m thinking now that what I need to do is organize my time into looser “blocks” of time, like about three hours each, and have a goal for each block, rather than each hour or half-hour or minute. It’ll be something like being back in school, and having six different periods in the day. I’ll try to achieve what I’m supposed to be doing each period, but I’ll know I have a three-hour window to figure it out/get it done.

4-7am: Opening the Day
- wake up
- shower/dress as needed
- breakfast, perhaps a morning chore of some sort
- get son off to school properly
- brief computer time as a treat if ready early

7-10am: Pay it Forward
- tidy the house (de-clutter)
- laundry
- exercise
- computer time as a treat if done early

10am-1pm: Get Out in the Open
- shopping
- library
- visiting
- gardening
- sightseeing

1-4pm: Back Home
- return from being out
- put away shopping
- unwind, rest, nap
- read, crafts, game, etc.
- welcome son home, have snack, do homework

4-7pm: Afternoon Chores
- family all helps with some chore or other (deep cleaning)
- play music to help things along
- kids get computer time when done with their chore
- cook dinner
- watch movies, family shows

7-10pm: Evening Wind-Down/Wrap-up
- Set up for morning
- crafts, games, books, family shows
- hot soaking bath if needed
- bedtime as early as you want.

Okay, that’s the plan. I’ve got it written down, and I think I can even remember it in my head. I’m going to start right now, picking up with morning chores, and see where this gets me. Wish me luck!

• empty dishwasher
• wash dishes
• wipe counters and stove
• shake rugs, sweep floor
• shine sink

8am: start dishwasher, vacuum house (noise restriction before 8am)

Then I can do whatever I want all day long.

Once I get this routine solidly down for 30 days, I will add other chores as necessary. Until then, I’ll count other chores as “catch up whenever I can/feel like it”.

Cleaning. yeah. I remember that.

I do clean, but not steadily. I think about this goal every morning when I clean out the dishwasher, but after that short chore I feel the urge to move on to other more important things like cooking. So each morning I clean a bit, but I’m not really “keeping” things clean.

Right now the kitchen is cluttered to the point it’s getting hard to cook in. I need at least the stove, sink, and one or two counters clean to cook comfortably, so generally I always clean to that level each day just before I start cooking.

I try to clean as I cook, to keep my working space efficient. But I can’t seem to maintain the gumption after I’m all done cooking. Then the eating dishes come out and pile up all day long as we have helping after helping of whatever I fixed. That’s why the counters get so cluttered up so fast.

My daughter is cleaning the kitchen now. I just polled her and she agreed she’s cleaning about the same as me, to a degree of cleanliness where she feels ready to cook. She’s making burritos. :)

I’m so excited I don’t have to cook tonight. I’m feeling tired today and mopey, like my head is a foot thick and top-heavy. It will be nice to eat dinner someone else prepared.

I did get laundry going today. Three loads. And one of them is already folded, if not put away.

I also dragged out my dehydrator and am experimenting with a new recipe to make “tomato figs”. Apparently if you halve paste tomatoes and cook them in a lot of sugar, and then dehydrate them to a leathery stage, they taste like dried figs or dates. I’ve been told they’re very good, so I’m testing a batch. It’ll be interesting to have something around that is out of the ordinary.

Also, I cleared out two boxes from my junk room, and discussed with my daughter what our plan is going to be to handle the rest. (It involves buying a lot of shelves for the office and sewing areas before we really have a shot at success.)

So even though I’m dopey, I have worked. Just not steadily, and not so’s you’d notice my house was actually clean if you visited today.

But I’d feed you chicken soup or burritos or tomato figs, and you’d shut up and be happy you were getting fed. So there. :P

;)

I don’t even know.

I think I am. I woke up this morning and cleaned out the dishwasher, and I did lots of laundry today including all my son’s bedding. I got my kids to do some chores too. But I was hosting a sleepover guest for my son and we focused on going swimming today. That’s where my energy went.

I got back from swimming feeling rather sick and dizzy. I think somehow sitting in the sun got me too hot, and the chlorine got in my eyes and skin and up my nose and made me feel icky. I went to bed and tried to sleep it off, but here it is hours later and I still feel icky. Maybe I’m sick?

Anyway… nothing in my house right now is really “clean”. But lots of boxes are being steadily unpacked, and that leaves a clutter around. And activity rooms are at least being rotated well… I.E. no crusted-over drifts of clutter. All the clutter is fresh.

My daughter (20) decided to start cleaning out the junk room today. That’s GREAT! There are so many boxes stacked in that room you can’t even reach most of them. She did a good job of going through all the boxes that got left in her bedroom (all her own stuff) sorting through what she wanted to keep or give away or toss or whatever. Now she’s able to use some of that space in her bedroom as a staging area to sort boxes from the junk room.

The problem is that sorting is a high-stress occupation. And tomorrow I’m both coordinating and lay-leading the church service, with many speaking parts, and it’s an odd service anyway because it’s a poetry reading and that’s weird. PLUS, at the last minute last night a friend begged me to watch her daughter tomorrow from after church until about 7pm so she could catch a show in Seattle that she already bought expensive tickets for, because her regular babysitter fell through and she’d already asked a dozen other friends who all said no. And the child is seriously autistic. And mute. So tomorrow is going to be a heck of a day for me.

So I have all this looming stress, and now is the time DD chooses to start unpacking boxes.

I was curious about some of the things in boxes way in the back that I haven’t seen in months. I went in there and poked around a little bit, and she had the nerve to ask me what I thought I was doing, as if SHE had all the rights to that room and I was going to mess it all up. I was very mad at her for that. I snapped that I don’t have to justify myself for looking in some of my own boxes and I’m not hurting anything and she should watch her tone. She apologized.

But now I know she’s pissy. I know I certainly am. And it isn’t conducive to having a good day tomorrow if tonight gets wasted in us being pissy at each other.

We need to put this behind us. She has already put back most of the boxes she dragged out to sort. We have a few things left in the hallway that we need to handle, but it isn’t too bad. We need to baby-proof the house, though, because the child I’m watching tomorrow has the mind of a two-year-old in an 11 year old body. I have to be sure she won’t hurt herself accidently by playing with something I left out, like scissors or whatever.

DD KNOWS this is happening tomorrow. I don’t know why she couldn’t project herself into my shoes a little bit and understand that now is not the best time to begin anything major like going through junk room boxes. I know she felt bored and wanted to be useful, but I wish she could have recognized the flaw in the timing there.

Now I’m all spun up. Normally I don’t hang on to feeling spun-up very long, but right now the tension of tomorrow is making it hard for me to relax. I hate feeling like this, but I hardly know how to calm down. Normally calming down just happens on its own rather quickly for me. I don’t know how to MAKE myself calm.

This bodes not well for the morrow.

Now we know why I suck so badly. I can’t stay consistent with anything. 30 days doesn’t seem like so much, but I simply couldn’t make myself follow through with this simple program. I’ve always failed at simple things like this.

Sure, I had excuses that seemed good to me. But I know that excuses don’t actually help at all. They just explain why you failed. They don’t make you NOT have failed.

I need a damned routine. I need to have some framework in my life. Lately I’ve been getting on the computer all day long and doing nothing else. The house skates along, but this is hardly living.

Today I tidied the bathroom. I half-assed the kitchen. I did cook dinner of baked chicken and vegetables. I felt tired because I walked a lot today. I probably walked about two miles total, which took about 90 minutes because of my out-of-shape-ness and hurting feet and climbing hills.

I got new shoes this afternoon and am ECSTATIC that I can walk now without my feet screaming in pain! I went to a specialty store called Route 16, and Jeff the salesman expertly sized up my feet in all three dimensions and got me special insoles that I needed. Turns out the shoes I got last time were four sizes too narrow for my feet, as well as being too pointed in the toe and not high enough on the top of my foot. Part of the reason why I walked for an hour this morning was so my feet would be appropriately swollen so I’d get a better fit that didn’t pinch like the last ones.

So I worked hard today. I shopped, I walked, and I cooked. But I didn’t do 30 minutes of cleaning.

I forgot to make entries this weekend, but I did not forget to clean! I had a sick day of migraine-y-ness on Saturday that left me struggling to function, but I did clean the kitchen anyway, as I did other days. I also had a dinner guest on Saturday for my daughter, and an overnight guest for my son. I was maxed out.

I’m not doing well at getting it all clean at the same time but I have been cleaning it in spurts as energy allows, and I cycle through the tasks so they all get done at least once per day. I’m asking for help when I can get it.

Today was another Monday Brunch, which I will detail under that goal. I cooked and cleaned in a kitchen other than my own, so I guess that counts (in a way). If I wasn’t dirtying my kitchen, I guess that’s the same sum as if I cleaned it.

Mike had a good point that there is a distinction between “cleaning” and “decluttering”. I guess I didn’t quite define for myself which I’m intending this goal to cover.

I find myself delaying even simple cleaning chores every day. Normal stuff that one must do daily to maintain a pleasant and functional house, like keeping the kitchen tidy and public areas nice. So for this 30 days I will focus on that. Decluttering may or may not happen.

I notice that every day I battle with feeling like even 30 minutes seems to demand more energy than I have. I need to swallow two Tylenol and a Vivarin just to get moving, otherwise I tend to stay in bed all day long, or only find energy to piddle around on the computer. Just standing and cleaning out the dishwasher feels like a drain of very limited energy resources. So that is where I’m focusing. Keep the kitchen clean = my number one job, even if it means my 30 minutes of work get broken into smaller increments.

• trash emptied that day
• dishwasher emptied
• stove and counters wiped
• floor swept and rugs shaken out
• clutter reduced to one small area (I’m not perfect)
• fresh rags always available in the cleaning drawer, and fresh sponges or scrubbers available near the sink (not old stinky slimy ones)
• sink shiny (not full of dirty dishes)

I want to reach this standard of cleanliness in my kitchen for at least a few minutes every day, even if I have to get there in stages.

Made my bed.
Cleaned the kitchen.
Scrubbed the toilet.
Made my kid fold laundry.

That last one TOTALLY counts. It’s called “resource management”.