Thursday, July 28, 2011

Yesterday Was Anti-Procrastination Day

And I was going to blog about it yesterday, but somehow it seemed more fitting to wait until today. I actually did get something done yesterday that I had been putting off, dusting the other half of the bedroom. While I was off my feet, the dust piled up pretty heavily, and since I can't yet drag the vacuum around to vacuum up the top few layers, I went through three Pledge multi-surface wipes Tuesday dusting just three pieces of bedroom furniture.  One of them was my nightstand, which also needed to be decluttered. The top was home to several receipts, a plastic collar that was supposed to keep Truffle from ripping out his stitches and stayed on him all of two minutes before I realized it also acted as a megaphone for Siamese yowling, a bag of cough drops, and two books that I had started reading and then stopped months ago. So I stashed the cough drops on a shelf inside the nightstand, put the receipts in the plastic basket I use for holding receipts, and moved the collar from the nightstand to a chair. I put the books in the bookcase, and dusted it, the nightstand and my dresser. By then my foot felt sore, so I put the packet of dusting wipes where the cough drops had been and took a break.


That was how things remained yesterday, when a friend posted on Facebook that it was Anti-Procrastination Day. I didn't connect her post with the dusting, but I did notice some dust on an air conditioner vent in the bonus room, and in looking around to find something to reach it, I found a long forgotten lambswool duster. Armed with the duster, I dusted the bonus room, the living room and the rest of the bedroom. I even found a box to put the collar in as a start on a donations box, to which I will add other unneeded items as I come across them. So far it holds only the collar and occasionally Truffle.


When I retired I had big plans for de-cluttering and organizing my house, plans that did not take into account how much I hate housework. For instance, I was going to give one room a thorough cleaning each day until I worked my way through the whole house and started again. Unfortunately, I could never decide where to start. The dining room was the staging area for my photo sorting project, the bonus room has large pieces of furniture that need moving before I could give the floor a good cleaning, my office held boxes for the Boys and Girls Club collection, and so it went.


I did actually get four boxes and four large bags filled up to donate to the Boys and Girls Club, because they sent me a postcard telling me when they would have trucks in the area. I also filled two boxes with books and donated them to a book drive. I got the pictures that I took on my Africa trip digitized and put on disk. I started an ambitious exercise program, until I broke my foot.  I finally trimmed the bedskirt with the seam binding I made three years ago. Once I was allowed on my feet again, I de-cluttered my office and the top of the baking center in the kitchen*, and sorted through and tossed out old clothes that were literally falling apart. I haven't spent all my time since retirement sitting around eating bon-bons, or more recently carrot sticks, it just feels that way.


When you have no fixed schedule and no deadlines, it's hard to set a time to do unappealing chores because there's no reason to do them now rather than tomorrow or the next day, unless someone sends you a postcard saying a truck will be in the area. I get things done a little here, a little there, and when I look back, I often realize I've done more than I think, but my plan to turn into a whole different kind of person, one who is organized and focused and tackles Big Projects, is not going so well.


So having something like Anti-Procrastination Day roll around is really a big help to me. Could we maybe arrange to have it once a week?




* It's actually a base cabinet on rollers with a butcher's block top that's sitting where the unused kitchen desk used to be. It's where we keep baking pans, flour, rice, corn meal, and grits.  It also collects odds and ends, just like the desk used to.

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