Random; house

Writing this blog is a good thing for many reasons, but one of the unintended things that has come of it is a pressure to post almost daily, and get it in by midnight. This creates a schedule, or an imperative almost, to be logged on and ready to write before midnight. With this kind of parameter, it's easier for me to get things done, and say, okay, I will do house thing from the moment I get home from Swarthmore and be done in time to log in before midnight.

This works in the early evening too. I get home about 5:45. On Thursdays I have to leave at 6:30 to head south. That leaves a brief gap, but with a clear start and end time, off I go. Today in the gap time I put dishes away, washed more dishes, made dinner, unpacked a box, ate dinner, got class stuff together and left. Not bad for 45 minutes.

I've read that if you have a task or chore you don't like doing, or regularly put off, if you create these time parameters, things go better. So if you don't like to clean, like me, you say, okay, I will clean for 1 hour, and get as much done in the hour as you can. This works well for me. If I have too much open-ended time, I get less done. This is why I will never work at home.

Unrelated decision: no more hiding things - keeping them wrapped up, saving them for the right time, not using them because they are too good. Tonight in one of my boxes of kitchen stuff were some plates that I bought a few years ago and kept wrapped up because I had no place to store them in the open, but also because they were too nice to use. If I'm not going to use it, or at lease look at it out in the open, I shouldn't have it.

Think of how nice this will look as a centerpiece, or under some lovely asparagus or clementines.

This is the fun part of playing house.