Sunday afternoon and the weather is so perfectly sunny and blue-skied that it’s hard to believe it’s the very heart of February. Instead of building snowmen or cursing frozen toes in bed at night, I feel like I should be hosting friends in the backyard for a barbecue, maybe running in sprinklers or chasing the ice cream man. As much as I love it, I’ve so far squandered it, sadly. I think I’m subconsciously waiting for it to be a little more predictable, another couple weekends of this I’ll be convinced. I’ll retire the jeans and call up the shorts from the reserves, stop checking the chance of rain before work each morning, and work on my flip-flop tanlines. It’s coming… I can sense it.
Roughly a week from now, I’ll drop Sharaun and Keaton off at the airport where they’ll navigate their way to Florida to our newborn nephew, and Keaton’s first cousin, baby Hobson. Then, for five whole days, two of them being weekend days, I’ll be a complete and total bachelor. And, as much as I’ll miss them both, you have no idea how much I’m looking forward to this time. See, I have a plan… a scheme, a grand idea I’ve been machinating and devising ever since we booked her trip. If all goes well, I plan to use those four days to clean. Yup; you read me right: I want to clean. And I don’t mean dust or vacuum, although I’ll likely do those things; I mean clean. Harsh-sounding or not, I’ve often found myself plotting just how I’d bring the house back into order if Sharaun were to just “disappear.”
Don’t worry, I’m not considering looking for shady ex-cons on Craigslist or anything, this is just a fanciful line of thought I sometimes turn to when the place is overwhelmingly disarrayed. See, after Sharaun disappears, I immediately set to work bringing the house in-line with my expectations: things have a place and when taken from that place are subsequently returned to it; clean is the “base” state and all ongoing effort is reduced to simple tidying; and things that are trash or arguably trash are thrown away instead of ferreted into corners or stowed for no reason. I figure, given a week without anyone undoing all my doing, I could have this place in a state I’d be happy to come home to each day.
So, in what I feel must be a test, I’ve been given that week by the powers on high. I’ve decided now that I’ll use that time to bring this place into that “base” state of clean. My plan of attack: Before Sharaun leaves, I plan on investing in about twenty or so moving-size cardboard boxes. After she’s gone, I’ll label the boxes in groups: trash for sure, why not trash, storage, and donate. Then, with my time, I’ll go methodically through rooms and parts of rooms in the house, bucketing items into boxes accordingly, striving for some kind of Godly top-to-bottom Spring cleaning. I’ll leave the boxes in the front room before doing anything with them to give Sharaun a chance to veto any of my choices, but the goal would be to either have them stowed or gone not long after she’s back.
Think it’ll work? Yeah, I have my doubts too.
Goodnight friends, I love you because you laugh at me.
Also written on this day...
- perestroika - 2011
- c'mon subconscious - 2010
- our resident baglady - 2009
- top 500 - 2005
- fish backs and cheeks - 2004