{"id":913,"date":"2011-04-09T12:01:56","date_gmt":"2011-04-09T16:01:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/noelfigart.com\/blog\/2011\/04\/09\/clean-all-the-things\/"},"modified":"2011-04-09T12:01:56","modified_gmt":"2011-04-09T16:01:56","slug":"clean-all-the-things","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/noelfigart.com\/wordpress\/2011\/04\/09\/clean-all-the-things\/","title":{"rendered":"Clean All the Things"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am not particularly neat by nature or general habit.<\/p>\n

I am<\/strong> neat by taste. I like order. You can see the conflict, yes?<\/p>\n

I do have some habits to take care of this adapted from Flylady<\/a>. We do have a slightly different approach, but the goals are similar. We’re messy packrats who really would prefer to live in a neat home, and frankly made a pig’s ear out of the attempt for most of our lives.<\/p>\n

Part of what I do is daily routine. (Make my bed the minute I get up, make sure the kitchen is cleaned up once a day, etc.)<\/p>\n

Part of what the household does is weekly routine. Clean All the Things. (Declutter, dust, vacuum, change bedsheets, give hard floors a quick damp mop). Depending on how bad things are, this can take from 20 minutes to an hour. It’s not enough for white glove inspections, but it keeps the house from degenerating into chaos, and getting used to piles of clutter in corners to the point where we don’t even “see” them as we climb over them. I’ve lived like that and I didn’t feel good with it. Hence the change.<\/p>\n

This week was definitely a 20 minute week, especially as my son and I did a very <\/em>thorough Clean All the Things last week.<\/p>\n

In fact, so much so that when I commented it was time to Clean All the Things, my son objected, saying the house wasn’t very messy. (It wasn’t). I said that he was right. The house wasn’t all that messy, so if we did Clean All the Things, it wouldn’t take very long. Neither would it next week. Stuff wouldn’t pile up. He still disagreed.<\/p>\n

We took a vote1<\/sup>, and his father and I carried by a 2\/3 majority, so All the Things got Cleaned.<\/p>\n

I talk a lot about the mundane keeping up of stuff, I know. It’s something I never learned as a child. Not that no-one tried to teach me, mind. It’s just that it was really difficult for me to learn, and I didn’t even really see the value of it. I was into epics<\/strong>, for pity’s sake! Heroic effort, I could value, and get into. Moderate, patient, long-term effort? Not so much. It’s why being able to keep my house clean on a regular basis was such a victory for me and one I still reflect on a great deal.<\/p>\n

Now, my pleasure centers still light up at the intensity of effort stuff, and I think that’s okay. I can pour everything into the few hours I’m in front of a class. That’s not hurting anything. In fact, it’s good.<\/em> But then I need to go home and be patiently moderate about studying for the next class, writing the handouts, and dealing with the other aspects of my life.<\/p>\n

I think the theme of this year is going to be learning to be moderately<\/strong> immoderate.<\/p>\n

Though I swear, I thought you were supposed to have everything sorted out<\/em> by the time you were in your forties?2<\/sup> Goodness knows, my grandparents seemed to in their own minds. I wish I could ask them what they were working on personally (if anything) when they were my age. My parents had my brother and I to deal with. NO-ONE could possibly<\/strong> feel like everything was sorted with us<\/strong> as children. We were kinda challenging to rear.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

1<\/sup> Unlike many homes, that vote was not fake. If 2 out of the three of us voted not<\/em> to Clean All the Things, None of the Things would have been Cleaned.<\/p>\n

2<\/sup> At least, it’s what I used to think at sixteen. Yes, I know, in many ways I’m mentally still a teenager. Stop laughing at me. It’s not nice to laugh at people who can’t help it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am not particularly neat by nature or general habit. I am neat by taste. I like order. You can see the conflict, yes? I do have some habits to take care of this adapted from Flylady. We do have a slightly different approach, but the goals are similar. We’re messy packrats who really would … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Clean All the Things”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,33,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-flylady","category-household","category-mental-health"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/noelfigart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/noelfigart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/noelfigart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noelfigart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noelfigart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=913"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/noelfigart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/noelfigart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noelfigart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noelfigart.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}