Scrubbed

Inspirational song: Good Clean Fun (The Monkees)

Keeping a clean house when one lives with multiple chronic illnesses can be a challenge. I'm not always up for that challenge. I've been putting off tasks that I considered low on the priority ladder for a long time. Some things have waited months for me to address them, like the stacks of papers on the piano. When we rearranged for the Christmas tree, I took that as a jumping off point to go through some of the accumulated paper junk, on the piano and the key table. I made significant progress on those bits of delayed maintenance, although there's still work to do. I'm telling myself that's what spurred me to keep going on other messes, although to be honest, it was probably the expectation of the maintenance guy who was supposed to show up this afternoon (who never showed). I cleaned in bursts all day, hitting every room upstairs, working on laundry, dishes, and random misplaced crap. I wore myself out three times over. I hurt after each flurry of activity. But I ended the day feeling like I was halfway to normal. I'm telling myself to do this again tomorrow, and maybe the day after. Getting (almost) completely caught up would be the best gift I could give myself this holiday season.

I let this cleaning impulse carry over to someplace I rarely clean: my phone. I went through nearly an entire battery charge clearing out photos I don't need, all the way back to 2016. I didn't delete everything, but I did enough that my gallery app froze up twice. I wish I had counted how many pictures I deleted. It was surely over a thousand. I'm hoping this accomplishes two important things: to make those features run more quickly (it's so bogged down now), and leave me plenty of space to take dozens of new ones on next week's mystery adventure. (It's a mystery to you. I know what it will be.)

Having spent all day on these things, I was reluctant to take new random pics to illustrate the blog. I kind of want to go back and put up an old one from Christmas past. I bet if I hadn't told you, you'd never haven known...