I'm Way Ahead

I had a successful mowing experience yesterday. Didn't break the mower... the mower didn't break me. My summer mowing muscles are very vocal this morning, but it's not bad. Last year, I made jokes about how I KNOW I'm out of shape when a riding lawn mower can give me sore muscles. But it's an old mower and on small inclines I just know that squeezing my thighs against the seat as hard as I can will eliminate any chance of the mower tipping over and depositing me on my back.

My house is clean! For the first time in a long time, I woke up and every room in my house (with the exception of the back room that no one uses) is in order, dusted, swept, and vacuumed. This is a rarity for me. Too many times I get caught up in a spiral of procrastination and frustration that goes something like this:

I wake up with good intentions and start to sweep the kitchen floor and in the process, I notice something needs to be wiped down, so I'll stop to wipe whatever down and think as along as I have this dust rag in my hand, I'll go in the living room and wipe some other stuff down and while I'm in there, I notice I've left my shoes and/or socks on the floor, so I'll stop wiping stuff down to pick those up and put them in the bedroom and when I go in my bedroom I see I haven't made my bed, so I'll set the socks and shoes down and start to make my bed when I realize there's a cat on there sleeping and I don't want to disturb him/her so I stop making the bed because now I have to pee and I go in the bathroom and geez, when's the last time I swept in here so I'll go get the broom from the kitchen where I haven't finished sweeping in there yet, and start to sweep in the bathroom when I think I'll just put some of this bowl cleaner in the toilet while I'm sweeping so I put the cleaner in the toilet and decide to empty the trash and I grab the bag of trash from the bathroom and I take it out to the back porch to throw it away and since I'm taking the bathroom trash out, I'll just go collect the rest of the trash in the house... and then I'm tired and I go sit down and what I'm looking at is a house full of half done chores and in the process of cleaning, I've moved stuff out of the way and things are not in their place and it's more of a mess then when I started.

Yesterday, though... I went through my little routine of half finished chores and pushed myself until it was all done. And now it is... and I can spend this whole day doing other stuff that I put off until this stuff was done and I'm really excited about that. And on top of having my house clean, I took off work for two days so now I get to spend the next two days being on vacation in a clean house.

And did I mention I didn't break the lawn mower yesterday?