Clean, You Slovenly Wench, Clean!

Woke up before dawn this morning (which isn't hard to do this time of year) and laid there in the dark thinking. Thinking it felt so good in bed and the rest of the house wouldn't feel nearly as warm and comfortable. Thinking about all the areas of my house that need a good cleaning.

I think this was sparked by the fact that I pulled a pair of shoes out of the bottom back of my closet yesterday and they had dust balls clinging to the laces. Hmm, when was the last time I took everything off the floor and vacuumed in there?

The little area that is my pantry becomes a messy hodge-podge of things stuffed in anywhere there's room (not near enough space in there for what I try to store) almost immediately after I sort and clean the shelves. I have to haul a stool over every time I need to get out or put away anything on the top shelf of only four so I have been known to actually toss things up onto that highest shelf and hope it doesn't fall back out on me.

My quilt studio has never been dirtier. My husband asks how a quilt studio can possibly get "dirty." It's amazing the amount of threads, scraps of fabric, dust, lint and fuzz that end up not only on the floor but on all surfaces, when it's not dusted and cleaned regularly. Because I haven't had as much time in there to quilt this winter as I've wanted, I think I've avoided spending the time I do have cleaning.

We have lots of books on bookshelves and in bookcases. I talked last fall about the need to pull all of them out and dust the books along with dusting and cleaning the shelves. Haven't gotten to that yet.

My desk. Oh, my desk. I need to sit at my desk for about three days straight going through drawers cleaning and organizing. My one big file drawer is so stuffed full I have a hard time pulling a file out let alone trying to put a new file in. I know I could whittle the files down to about half if I took the time to sort through and throw out obsolete material.

I remember once when I was working full-time outside the home. A co-worker had quit to have a baby and was visiting work one day when she remarked that she was bored silly at home. She said, "Well, I cook and clean and what else is there to do?" I thought at the time that I must have been doing something wrong. I was sure I could be home full-time and not have enough time for all my cooking and cleaning. ('Course, in all fairness to me - yay, me! - at the time I had a huge garden, we had milk goats and poultry, were raising and bottle feeding an orphaned fawn, building our house and had no running water.)

Granted, the everyday (day after day after day!) things get done and I'm sure no one walking into my house thinks it's filthy.

But did I eventually pop out of my warm, cozy bed this morning and start cleaning? No, not yet, but as you can see from this post, I'm still thinking about it.