drowning in minutia

Every so often I get this crazy, reckless desire to organize. My house, my life, my cleaning schedule, my meals, my budget, my priorities. I am experiencing this right now. The focus is the house/cleaning schedule, but all of the above listed things are tied up with eachother.

Right now I have dishes in the sink and strewn gracefully across the counter and the table. My children have consented to gracefully spread macaroni and cheese underneath the table. My painting escapade has left several brushes, rollers and cans of paint on my kitchen shelves and on top of the refrigerator. The inside of the refrigerator needs desperately to be cleaned. I will leave the description of chaos to that room, as to not overwhelm you.

So of course I am blogging right now, because that is what one does when needing a legitimate excuse to avoid housework. And I am avoiding housework because what I really want to be doing is organizing my crawl spaces and closets and throwing away junk and getting rid of things like a shirt I haven't worn for three years (because I bought it when I was just pregnant with child number two, with the understanding that I could wear it for another month or so and then again seven months later, but a couple birthdays for this child have come and gone, as well as another pregnancy and I think maybe I've worn it for five minutes or maybe ten minutes) but -deep breath- I shouldn't really jump into a big project without having a semi-clean environment where I can place the project, you know?

I think I may be feeling this way because summer is leaving which means life with a schedule is upon me and why didn't I take more advantage of the time I had in the past few months? Well, because that's the way life is. Or maybe it's because there is an impending schedule, and I feel that this ought to fit into it easily, right? (Oh wait, the organization of my schedule is on my list of things to organize that I need to schedule...)

Anyway, the problem is I am overwhelming myself. Take the kitchen for example. It's not just the stuff that needs to be washed and put away, today when I look at it I see a floor that needs mopping and cupboards that could stand to be wiped out and spices that might like to be organized. I move into the next room. I need to pick up toys, throw away papers, vacuum, dust bookshelves, clean out the closet, maybe wipedown the baseboards, organize all the junk on the computer desk....

It's easy to get so caught up in all that could be done, that nothing gets done at all. But I know that if I just jump into the basics, I'll have a house that is at least picked up, and then I'll feel okay about sitting down for a few minutes to make a list of things I can do right now, and others I can do later this week, and at some point I'll get to cross those things off, or worst case scenario, I'll end up just throwing the list away. But hey, that's one less paper on the computer desk!