My back spare bedroom has the door closed and it is difficult to get open. It’s full of boxes and bags and stacks of stuff I have been putting back there “until I have time to do something with them.” Of course, the school year has proceeded and I haven’t fixed it yet.
My living room is covered in a fine layer of dust that hasn’t been lifted since Easter. I have it on my list of things to do, but to be honest, it will be last thing on the list because I have written the list in the dust on my library table in the living room. Wouldn’t want to wreck that.
I have three piles of laundry lying in different places—in a chair in my bedroom, on the spare bedroom bed and in a basket on the couch. It looks terrible and everything is getting wadded up and wrinkled, but I’ll get it all fixed. In another week, everything will get done.
My cupboard is bare and my sink is full. I read this week that there’s a new app on the phone that will allow you to check inside your refrigerator while you are at the store, just to see what you need. That sounds ridiculous. I don’t want to look inside my refrigerator when I’m in the kitchen; I sure don’t want to see it when I’m out in public! But even that will be fixed in another week.
You may ask, why am I waiting a week? Well, because this mess in my house has been building up for the last nine months and next week school is out for the summer. At that point, I will no longer have stacks of correcting to do, tons of lesson plans to make out or any of the four thousand other things teachers get to do when “school is over” for the day. It’s never over at 3 o’clock for a teacher, and it’s seldom over at 10 p.m.
I will have fun with my summer. I won’t get at the housework right away, of course. The first week I’ll just sit on the back deck with a pot of tea and stare into space. I won’t be looking at anything in particular and I might chuckle every once in a while, but no one should worry about that.
I’ll get the dishes and the laundry and the dusting caught up gradually as the summer progresses, but the refrigerator and the bathroom will probably be put off for last. I have thought many times about getting a cleaning lady to come in once a week, but I always end up rejecting the idea. I don’t have the time to clean the bathroom and the refrigerator once a week before she came in, because I sure wouldn’t be letting any cleaning people see those two things as they are. They’d call the health department.
So, things pile up. I have a stack of letters, invitations, appointment cards, junk mail, ect., that I just leave on the desk. I sort out the important stuff, but when I’m done with anything, I add it to the pile. In another week, I’ll get around to shredding, discarding or scrapbooking the things in the pile that need it, but for right now, that stack just keeps getting higher. It’s the dog’s go-to spot when she’s looking for something to rip up, but she can’t read, so she always ends up shredding the things I wanted to keep.
And that brings me to the stairwell—the site of her shredding escapades. The steps are so full of bits of paper and cardboard that I’ve forgotten what color the carpet is. It’s strewn with half-destroyed toys and shreds of her latest kennel bed. In another week, I’ll get around to clearing it away, but for now, it’s just going to have to continue to look like a tornado site.
There will be no pictures to go with this blog, so you’ll have to take my word for it, but my house looks pretty bad. Any picture I could take, you just wouldn’t want to see. But it’ll all be fixed. Final bell for the year rings in a week!
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