Saturday, 14th May
This morning I actually cried from sheer boredom. I didn't even know you could. There may have been other things mixed in (maybe 30% getting a cold and a not-small percentage also frustration) but it was mainly... boredom. You may think this blog is about First World problems. You're right. I said in my last post that you can only write what you know, and First World problems are the ones I'm most familiar with, right now. I do apologise.
The weekends seem to be the hardest during the Covid lockdown/semi-lockdown. There is still a small part of my body that maintains something should be different. It has been Groundhog Day Monday to Friday and it knows about that. But it still insists that something should be exciting or different at the weekend. And yet it isn't. Not really. There just tends to be a bit more mess around the house, because we all four are in it rather than three plus one in the office. I wish I could get excited about mess.
And I'm not finding inspiration to get things done around the house. At first I thought I might, but decided I preferred being in the garden and shelved the house jobs. Now it's a bit colder and I'm not doing the gardening or the house jobs. I've reached an impasse, hit a wall, walled in.
A few weeks back, I started something called 'zone cleaning'. Having decluttered a lot of my house and established the 'power hour' of weekly cleaning, I was finally ready. Or so I thought. This week's zone was the bathroom. Good, I thought, earlier in the week. Because it's filthy.
The first job on my list was to clean the toilet brush itself. (How does one do that, exactly?). I won't go into detail, but my little girl had decided to try and clean the toilet with the brush once she'd been and it... needs some attention. Anyway. You know where that toilet brush is? Well, I took it downstairs and that was the first part of its adventure. Then I put it outside. Then the kids came downstairs and I thought I'd better move it out of their grasp. So I moved it to a wall in the garden where they couldn't reach it. And now it's sitting there, uncleaned. And it has been for three days.
So I haven't yet got to the next things on my list for Zone 3, the bathroom. Why is it so hard? Even when I break it down to the individual elements of what needs doing, I'm falling at the first hurdle. I even have audiobooks and podcasts to make the job less boring. And still, the toilet brush sits on the garden wall, in its protective stand, sheathed from the world. Uncleaned.
Lack of time is not the issue during this lockdown. The day stretches ahead, with its many, many minutes, and I could certainly fill them with productive tasks and get this zone cleaning under my belt. And that could revolutionise things and really make my house look nice. But if only the minutes contained 60 seconds of motivation, rather than lethargy...
So I'm finishing here and hoping that just writing this and confessing to the world that my toilet brush is sitting out on the garden wall, will propel me, with some sense of accountability, and a sense of shame, to sort it. I'll let you know in my next post.
Bet you didn't think I'd end on that kind of a cliffhanger, did you?