Only two months ago, the end was in sight

I thought that I was finally going to have a clean and orderly house. Or, at least, I would have something pretty close to a clean and orderly house. Possibly I would need different furniture and such for it to really be what I want, but I was doing a lot of cleaning and I thought that I would soon have all of that done.

And that was only two months ago that I thought that. I had done some really major cleaning, the kind that requires bookcases and such to be moved so that I can clean next to the walls and such. So I had done all of that, and I had thrown away tons of stuff. I still needed to deal with one room, but all the major stuff in most of the other rooms was done, and I imagined myself next going through some of my book collection and possibly taking some of that to Half Price Books before trying to reorganize the arts and crafts supplies.

And then I took a break from the serious sorting and cleaning to get ready for Christmas and finish up with the ceramics stuff. And somehow taking this break has resulted in there being an even bigger mess than there was to start with.

I realize that that isn't entirely true. I did all the serious work of moving the bookcases and cleaning behind the furniture in most of the rooms, and that part will not need to be done again this year. But it does look like the rest of it is a bigger mess than before I started. And I realize that really can't be true either, but it certainly does look that way.

Christmas was two weeks ago, but somehow I didn't get much work done during that time. I didn't try to tackle the mess again until the day before yesterday. Why is there still so much stuff to deal with? I could almost just sit there and cry about it.

I can't even think why I have done so little work since Christmas. I had a few days that I didn't feel well, and there's always a bit of after-Christmas packing up to do that I put off until after all the clearance sales. I think that Targets went down to 90% off on Monday, but I'm not sure, cause I didn't go on Monday. There's not enough left to drive to any of them unless I'm going there for something else anyway. There's candy canes and a bit of wrapping paper and lots of cards. I have enough candy canes, and I don't think I'll need much in the way of wrapping paper, and I'm not a card person. I tried doing the cards one year, and then I realized that you could end up spending more on the cards than I could afford for the actual gifts, so that was the end of my sending cards.

So I suppose that I traditionally don't do much in the way of cleaning during the two weeks after Christmas, but that doesn't seem to be a good excuse this year, since I didn't have much money to buy clearance stuff.

Anyway, after two days of serious cleaning in the one room, I have finally made a dent in the mess. But that's all it is, a dent. There's still a large mess to deal with before I'll be turning my attention back to the rooms that I thought that I'd already dealt with.

My husband is scheduled to go to Shreveport for a week. There's really nothing exciting about going to Shreveport anymore, but I usually go with him anyway to relax and/or do some serious knitting. But I probably won't go this time due to the mess. In theory, part of the reason I don't get much work done is that when he is here we find reasons put off work. Wouldn't you like to go to lunch? And you think that whatever you were going to do can wait til after lunch. And of course after lunch you go to the library, or you do some shopping, or you run some other errands. By the time you get back from "lunch" you are tired, maybe you actually take a nap, and by the time you feel like doing anything else it is time for dinner. And that's what happens on a day that we really had nothing planned. Sometimes we actually have plans and go to a movie or something.

So the fact is that I don't get that much done when he's at work, and I get even less done when he's not at work. And he's usually not at work much around Christmas.

Big, huge mess. If I were in college, I could win awards with this mess. I realize that after years of collecting junk it gets this way, but how did it get this way again so soon after cleaning so much of it two months ago?