Small Steps Toward France

Earl and I both know that the end of his job could be inching toward us. Last week, one of his co-workers announced 60 days left until the possibility of them losing their jobs.
We have a backup plan, as I announced in my post France Dreams Coming True, but we're still kind of in denial. That plan requires selling our house. And whose house is ready to go on the market?
Definitely not mine.
On Friday, I  made one small step toward preparing it.
I cleaned up the area around my desk. Our house is small with two bedrooms upstairs and another bedroom downstairs. My desk is situated in a nook in the hallway.
I don't often write there because I need a window, so I haul my laptop to the dining room table or the front porch.
But papers I've graded and notes I've taken and bills I've paid, plus all of the paraphernalia gathered from the kids' events and school reports gathered on my desk in the past five years.
Here's how it looked before I started to clean it.

Hours later, with three boxes full of recycling and three neatly labeled crates, one for each child, my desk area looked neat.

Now if I could just convince myself to work on one area each day. Or if I would pull one box out of the basement storage room every day and figure out what is worth keeping or what needs to go, I could be ready in 60 days to throw the house on the market.

But, a bigger challenge awaits if we do sell the house, because how can we get rid of everything. Everything! Wooden trains and American Girl dolls and rocking horses. Carefully made quilts and snow globes of Paris. Framed photos of all those family members. 

Maybe I'll put them all in small boxes and whenever someone comes to visit us in France, they have to bring along one of our momento boxes. 

Today, hopefully, we're riding our bikes down to the Rib and Jazz Fest to listen to some music. We planned to go last night, but the extreme heat and the itch of my poison ivy convinced us to stay home. 

Domino Effect

You know how one thing leads to another.
Nothing is ever simple. I'm learning that lesson all over again tonight.
Grace will be home tomorrow. (Yay!)
That means, I have to clean out her bedroom, a room that her younger brother claimed before her flight left Columbus.
In order to clean out her room, I have to move Tucker. He doesn't want to share a room with Spencer so he'll get the basement rec room futon. He has a dresser there, but no place to hang his hoodies and the button-up shirts he has started wearing.
So before I can move him, I have to figure out where to hang up his clothes.
Then it hit me. I have a coat tree in my room that holds purses, scarves, belts and my robe. I can clean that off and move it downstairs for Tucker's things.
I looked in my closet to figure out where to hang the robe and the scarves. Then I needed to clean the warm weather clothes out of my closet in order to make room for the things hanging on the coat tree, in order to move Tucker's things to the rec room, in order to begin cleaning Grace's room for her 40-day stay at home before she moves off to college and I'll reverse that order.
I have no hopes that her room will be as clean as it was here in June 2009 when I spent three days straightening it, but I know it will be a bit more organized than Grace left it when she went to France and Tucker is leaving it as he moves to the basement bedroom. I'm going to start in there by picking up the dirty socks and the wadded up tissues. Who knows if there's still a nice wood floor under all those discarded bath towels.

No Time for Cleaning

I'd like to give a shout out to working moms; no, maybe not even moms, but working women. I don't know how you've done it all these years. Of course, as a stay-at-home mom for years, who still managed to work from home, I don't know how I did it all those years either.
Here I am at Friday of the week and I still have essays from two full classes to grade. I could look at the bright side -- that means I've finished grading four classes worth of homework.
Yesterday, I worked from 9 to 1 then again from 2:30 to 5. But, of course, I'm teaching four classes online this quarter, so when I actually get home, more work is waiting.
Then there are groceries to buy, dinner to fix, and kids to talk to. Meanwhile, the essays waiting to be graded pulse silently in the background, taunting me.
I haven't vacuumed for...well, awhile. I could be doing that right now instead of writing a blog post! I've offered the boys 10 dollars per room they clean, but they have to follow my carefully constructed list of cleaning steps. So far, they'd rather be broke than clean.
My husband Earl is a real trooper, doing the laundry to keep us all in sweet-smelling clothes.
In addition to the waiting essays and the gathering dustballs, TurboTax is downloaded ready for me to complete our yearly taxes by the end of the month so I can submit it to the financial aid gurus and hope Grace continues to get some help with college expenses.
Saturday is shot, filled with swim meets and basketball games.
I'll get around to grading all of those essays, and I will finish our taxes, but the dust balls are just going to have to rally, maybe start some sort of wagon train to head out west, cause I'm not sure when I'll get around to sweeping them in that direction.

Based on a photo from:www.fourth-millennium.net

Ungrateful

Sometimes I read something and it bugs me that people seem ungrateful for their great opportunities.
The other day, a woman on my Yahoo writing group sent an email complaining about all the cities she has to go to and the hotels she has to stay in while she is promoting her new book. I felt truly bad for her, which is why I sent back an email that said, "Ummm. I'd take it."
I would. I'd love to wake up and be disoriented, wondering where I need to speak today, convincing readers to buy my published book. Of course, I haven't sold a book yet, so that's not going to be me any time soon.
I dream of living in France and torture myself by reading the blogs of Americans who are happily settled there. So when one of them complains that she can't find a good donut in Paris, I'm not very sympathetic. Donut? Come on. You're surrounded with the best pastries ever. I suppose if I eventually move, I will miss American things and probably complain about them.
Then it struck me that I am ungrateful in a different way.
I have a husband who does housework and laundry, without expecting much in return. Most women would be thrilled to have a husband like this, and I am, but still find myself whining about some things.
I won't go into details about the sheets and the upside down mattress pad (yes, the mattress pad was on the bottom of the mattress rather than protecting the top of the mattress), but the missing toothbrush is one I can share.
When I came home from work on Friday, the house smelled like bleach and cleaning products. He had cleaned the bathroom. "Thanks!" I said, enthusiastically then forgot about it.
That evening, I was preparing to go teach another class. In the bathroom, I searched for my toothbrush. It was gone. I called Earl who was at work.
"What did it look like?" he asked, alerting my suspicions.
"Was it kind of ratty looking?" he asked, building his case.
"Just tell me," I said.
Since Tucker has been sick, he decided the toothbrushes should be boiled. But these are not his mother's toothbrushes. The cheap plastic melted when he tried to boil mine. So, he threw it away and didn't think about it again.
"I thought it was one of the kids'," he said.
Nevertheless, I was out a toothbrush and I taught until 10 so wouldn't have another chance to buy a new toothbrush until the next day. Ick!!!
So that is me, complaining about my husband cleaning the bathroom and melting my toothbrush when most women would be eternally grateful that their husbands cleaned anything.

Clutter

While Grace was gone, I decided to clean her room. I know, I know. First, she should be responsible for cleaning her own room. Second, I shouldn't mess with her stuff. But there were piles of clothes and bags and notebooks and papers. My friend Sheila said, "I always loved it when I would go to camp and my mom cleaned my room."
I remember always hoping a fairy godmother would clean my room, but she never showed. So, I started with the floor. The floor of Grace's room is rarely seen. When she comes home, she throws her book bag, her swim bag, her lifeguard bag on the floor in front of her closet door. I was going to concentrate on the floor until I saw the older cat go into Grace's closet. I opened the door and saw him peeing (more like dripping) on the pile of clothes there. The cat went to the vet for a urinary tract infection and I switched my focus to the closet. I picked up every item of clothing, vacuumed and scrubbed the wood floor, organized the shoes. Found a place for her backpack and other bags on the shelf along the top. As I cleaned, I found $1.80 in quarters and dimes, along with a dollar bill folded into a tiny triangle. Spencer had carried out some trash for me and run things up and down the stairs. He was going to Panera to hang out with friends so I gave him the $2.80 I'd found so far.
It took me three days of hard labor to get this room in shape. I threw out two bags of trash, mostly papers, and organized all of her "keepsakes" into bins that are easily retrievable. I pulled a crushed gift bag from under her bed and looked through it. I found two birthday cards with a $25 Panera gift card and a $20 bill. Her birthday was in January. I put the cash in her money drawer, but I was sweating and decided the gift card was buying dinner for us.
Her bed, which was mine when I was a girl, but it had a canopy while now it is a mere four-poster, was listing at one end. We took off the mattress and boxspring so Earl could reinforce the frame. OMG! You should have seen everything that was under there. Some normal things, like her sewing basket and a bin with her American Girl doll wardrobes, but also trash and bags and boxes.
Tucker was excited by the booty I had found so far and was willing to help. He picked up a small festive Christmas box and opened it. Christmas cookies! Gag! I'd found her Halloween candy in the closet on a shelf, so I guess the next thing to look for would be Valentine candy.
It took more than a day to clean out from under the bed and vacuum so Earl could fix the frame. Then we replaced the mattress and boxsprings and put on the freshly washed bedskirt, mattress pad, sheets and quilt.
I still had the hard surfaces, her bedside table, dresser, bookshelf and desk. Grace refuses to throw away anything. This year, when Spencer was taking government she would consult her notes whenever he had a question. So I filled a bin with school notes. Another bin is full of her drawing and writing notebooks. This emptied up a lot of space on her bookshelf for actual books which previously inhabited the floor.
Finally, I moved on to her desk. I found many of the applications to college swim teams that had been sent by coaches. I organized those in a folder and put them at the front of her file folders. I found more birthday cards, including a $20 check from my parents, again from January.
So Grace was up $40, and we had a nice dinner at Panera, and her room is clean. For now. I know it won't last, but maybe in July when we have to clear out the desk and fit a twin bed into her room for the French girl who is coming, there won't be as much clutter to clear out.