Promises, Promises

We have a house guest coming today so yesterday all I had to do was pick up around the house cuz it's a mess and I don't even have any kids to blame it on. It's all me.

First thing yesterday morning (aka 10:30ish) I thought I'd start by picking up the yarn that's strung out all over the family room. I realized I needed a bigger container for it and I knew the basket in my art room closet would be perfect if I could find something else to put in its place. I scrounged around in the garage for a while and found an old milk crate that would work so I cleaned it up, emptied the basket, refilled the crate and thought I was done.

Then I noticed the basket was a little rough on the inside so I couldn't just toss my yarn balls in there. They would snag. All I needed was some fabric to stick in there as a liner. That was no problem since I have a laundry basket full of cotton scrap fabric and old bed sheets. I found a pink sheet that I liked then I thought it shouldn't be too hard to sew a few seams in it so that it looked more like a liner instead of a sheet shoved into a basket.

Once again, I forgot that I don't know how to sew. Not knowing how to do something is a sorry excuse for not doing it so I spent the next several hours measuring, cutting, pinning, taping, untaping, repinning, Googling, then finally sewing...on the wrong side. Okay, it's a basket liner not a prom dress so who cares if my seams are showing, right? I'm going to pretend that I don't care.

I knew that trying to finish off the liner would take some effort and that didn't feel like a good use of my limited time so I left it half finished and promised myself that I would finish it after the house guest left. Occasionally I do make wise time management decisions.
I started to load my half-finished basket with all my stray yarn balls when I realized that I hadn't yet finished winding them all with my new electric yarn baller that my mother bought me for my birthday. I thought it would be smart to go ahead and take the time to make them into proper balls since the balls stack which means my basket would not only be neater but would hold more yarn if it was all neatly organized.

I ran the rest of my yarn through the machine so that my balls would stack neatly in their new basket. Between winding sessions I managed to get a few loads of laundry done which made me feel like a multi-tasking dynamo. Now that I'm retired, getting out of bed is my big activity for the day so anything above and beyond that makes me feel like I've worked 8 hours, cooked a gourmet meal, raised 5 children, remodeled my bathroom, and made my husband blush...all in a single day.

One of the few advantages to aging is that I can now call my self "retired" with some credibility. I've been trying it for the past 20 years but if you say that when you're young you just look lazy. I AM lazy but I don't want to LOOK lazy.

I did manage to stop myself when I finished winding the last skein of yarn that I'm currently using. There are still 50 or more skeins in my art room that haven't been wound yet but I congratulated myself for knowing that it would be a time management mistake to wind those even though it felt like I was leaving a job half done. I promised myself I would finished them after the house guest left.

Did you notice how I did all that talking about my yarn baller without making a single innuendo? I'm pretty proud of myself since it doesn't take much for me to be lured into inappropriateness. 

Once I had all of my yarn neatly wound into stackable cylinders, I carefully placed them in my basket and admired how nice the family room looked with all of my junk put away. Mentally exhausted from a hard day of cleaning and sewing, I took a much deserved break and promised myself I would finish my tasks after I rested for a while.

I sat down to crochet a few more rows on the pillow cover I'm making for Jayson's woobie pillow. I'm not saying that my husband has to sleep with a woobie like a toddler would, but he has this little throw pillow that he can't sleep without. He says he uses it to prop up his shoulder because it takes the pressure off the bulging discs in his neck, but I've never really seen much propping action going on. Hugging...yes. Propping...not so much.

I sort of lost track of time while I was crocheting because the next thing I knew it was bedtime. As I was turning lights off throughout the house, I realized that I had only cleaned up one room and the rest of the house still looked like someone shoved a stick blender in through the roof and hit puree.

There's only so much I can do in one day so I promised myself I would hit the ground running this morning to finish up everything I didn't do yesterday. And I will do that as soon as I finish writing about it. Because I'm a writer, it's what I do. Okay, a retired writer. Who never really wrote anything. I just like the clicking sound my keyboard makes. I always promised myself that when I retired I would concentrate on writing something publishable. Now I know there are different levels of retirement and I don't think I'm at that level yet. I'm at that first level that likes to talk about all the things I can do now that I'm retired, but I never actually do them. Of course I'm not actually retired either. I guess the technical term would be "unemployed" but I've never really liked labels.

So now that I have my daily writing out of my system I can concentrate on cleaning up the rest of the house before our house guest arrives. Fortunately the guest room and bathroom are immaculate so maybe I can convince her to just stay in her room and read...something that I wrote...or thought about writing.

I promised myself to stop procrastinating just as soon as the house guest leaves.