Pre-Clean Phase

We had a bit of a breeze last night and a giant limb fell across the lower half of the deck stairs, shattering the trellis for the hop vine. On the bright side, the trellis’s sacrifice means the stairs are fine, so at least there’s that. And the coffee tastes particularly good this morning since I don’t have to do any jackleg carpentry.

One repair per weekend is enough. I know, I know–a house means repairs. But I already did plumbing this weekend, for godsake. Okay, I have to be honest, it was simply replacing a lever on the downstairs loo, but I swore five or six times so it still counts.

I’m contemplating doing a complete Kon-Mari on the kitchen. There are plenty of things we don’t use, and freeing them to fly into the world and find those who need them might mean my daughter can finally fit an air fryer into the cabinets somewhere. We aren’t getting any more appliances until we have room for them, and she’s been eyeing air fryers and griddles with hungry, hungry eyes. I wouldn’t mind a stovetop griddle myself, but we’re positively choked with other kitchen things and besides, the All-Clad lids are very inefficiently organized.

So I’m in the pre-clean phase, where I’m poking around cabinets and making decisions. Eventually I’ll decide what I actually want to do, and then a burst of activity will unnerve the dogs and make the children wish they’d never put the bug in my ear about griddles, of all things. I already have a list of things that need to move on to new homes; I just need to think about how I want to stack things in the freed-up space.

I can’t tell if my mood is a result of pre-coffee branch-wrestling, the attempt I made to slow down and not-work this weekend, or any of a hundred other unpleasant things like taking care of everyone else’s emotional needs and neglecting my own. A run will probably set me right, but in order to get there I have to grab brekkie and walk the dogs. For once, though, I’d like to just do the things that please me.

Wouldn’t we all.

It’s all Monday, I suppose. I have two questions for today’s Tea with Lili and there’s work to be done if I can just get everything else out of the way. I suspect I’m cranky because I haven’t written more than a bare 200 words per day for the weekend, and the itch to simply crawl back into a fictional world is mounting. At least inside a book I know what I’m doing.

I suppose I’d best get started since nothing at all will get done with me sitting around and moaning. I’ve a list, I’ve the dogs, and I’m in my running togs.

See you around, my dears.