I Was In A Tizzy

Is it just me? Or are the weekends consumed by catching up on annoying chores? I, invariably, do 4-5 loads of laundry, and at least 3 loads of dishes on the weekend. Do you know why this disturbs me?

There are only two of us!

The laundry isn’t such a big deal… I don’t do it throughout the week, so I’m not overly annoyed by the piling up of things in that area. But it feels as though I do dishes every waking moment of my life!

Part of me wants to blame it on Earl. He does most of the cooking, and my OCD flips when the dishwasher is loaded incorrectly, so I don’t have a problem that he only rinses his dishes… The only thing that displeases me is that he uses more dishes and utensils than are really necessary. He’ll just grab a random wooden spoon and realize later that he needed to grab a slotted spoon and just toss the wooden spoon into the sink and switch to the slotted spoon. He also likes to use ever mixing bowl in the house at once… I’m going to have to figure that one out.

But this isn’t really the point. The point is. I hate cleaning house… except when I get in a tizzy. Yesterday, I got in a tizzy.

At about 5, I suddenly looked at the kitchen and felt it was unfit to be a part of the living space. And immediately set to cleaning it. I’d already done 3 loads of dishes, but still had the enchilada dishes from supper to throw in and then I took to the counters.

We have a small kitchen that is (no offense to the landlord – who designed it) laid out rather poorly. And I – being a baker – have been in hate with this kitchen for the better part of our stay here. I have a lot of things that sit on the counter and they were all moved so that I might do a proper deep clean of the counter tops. And then, before each thing was replaced, they two were thoroughly cleaned. And then the floor… which somehow collects all gobs of hair from both Lucy and myself and stashes them at the toe kicks.

And then I cleaned off the Island and the table which lead to the cleaning of the dining room and then I cleaned off the sideboard which segued into cleaning the living room. And quite suddenly, the entire downstairs of the condo was quite clean…

Earl, wise enough to stay out of my way, watched vacancy.

And during cleaning I managed to do some Halloween decorating.

(Ignore the mail basket...)

“I Know You Like Your Plans”

Ladies and gentleman, I’d like you direct you above so that you may once again read the biggest understatement ever made!


Earl made this statement on our way home from work as we discussed our plans for the coming weekend. We are a traveling sort. It is in our blood to be on the move and we’ve found that if we don’t take a mini-road trip every once in a while, we get very irritable. But (and this is a very big but) I am a planner.

I need things to be planned (for sanity’s sake) and thus when we were planning and hadn’t decided completely, this came forth as an option…

Let’s just head north and find a room wherever we end up.

My heart stopped, my brain went into full blown panic mode and I tried to think of something to say, but was left gasping for air.

The he patted my knee and said “I know you like your plans.” I was waiting for justification of throwing me into my panic, but none came. So I immediately went into contingency planning.

I’ll admit. I have control issues. They’re not as bad as this might make it sound. I just hate the unknown. I HATE IT! It’s the reason I find most scary movies scary - that dread of the unknown. So when it’s not necessary that something is unknown, I’ll see to it that it isn’t.

Excuse me while I go fret over my secret plans to make things look spontaneous when they actually are very intricately planned.