Enough already!

As I was fishing socks out of the kitty litter, it hit me: I really need to get my shit together.¹

There’s a delicately teetering balance in my life. Most days it works out just fine. Slide out a jenga block or two and, sure, the structure looks precarious, but it’s still solid. Then someone comes along and removes that piece—you know, the bottom end piece—and I’m suddenly overtaken by a thousand blocks of wood.³ And because I’m so disorganized, I can’t find the plastic guide-y thing to help me rebuild my tower.

It might start when my friend calls to ask if her daughter can hang at our place before walking to school with us. I might say, “Sure—I’ll clear a path to the living room. She’s up to date on her tetanus shots, right?” I’m only partially joking.⁴ She might laugh.⁶

It might start when I realize I’m late to pick up my daughter after school and I must, therefore, change out of my pyjamas,⁷ so I might run upstairs and grab my jeans off the floor,⁸ run back downstairs and snatch my keys and coat, and then I might reach down for my scarf, which might have fallen to the floor,⁹ which might unleash a cloud of dust and cat hair, which might prompt a huge MF sneeze, which, if you’ve been following this blog at all, can only mean one thing: time to change my jeans.¹⁰ I might then rush downstairs and try to liberate the pair-two jeans from the piles atop the jerry-rigged laundry shelves, on the floor under which¹¹ I, in all my infinite wisdom, might have placed my three kitty litter boxes.¹²

What the fuck did I think was going to happen?

I’m guessing we all have these days when everything seems so out of control that you end up spending 95% of your time whining about about what a mess everything is, or about not being able to get anything done, or about not being able to find anything amongst the detritus of your life, which has somehow exploded in such a spectacular fashion that it’s left socks and underwear in the cat pooper.

And that, my friends, is what spurs me into action: it’s not the cat poop, or sneeze pee, or the biohazard in the kitchen sink, or the need for a tetanus booster. No, it’s me whining incessantly about how out of control everything is. Eventually I will get sick of it and say ENOUGH ALREADY! Time to stop whining and get moving—unearth the child and pet, create a clean environment, put those clothes away, update that to do list¹⁴ and ACT.

I was tired of listening to my own pathetic excuses, so this was the day I vowed to GET THINGS DONE.

So that’s what I did.

Errr... well, actually, what I did was write this blog post.

Hmmm. Never mind.

OK. TODAY is the day I GET THINGS DONE!

Wish me luck!

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1. I mean that figuratively—yes, I had dropped laundry in the kitty litter, but, miracle of miracles, I had actually scooped the kitty poop just prior to the sock incident. Small victories.²

2. But still—ewww.

3. Lazy writing alert! I feel the need to point out again that this a metaphor—not because I doubt your intelligence, but because I doubt my ability to pull off said metaphors.

4. True: I need to literally clear a path from the back door to the living room. Oddly, kids seem to take this in stride. Joke: Tetanus query. Most kids get tetanus shots at some point that are good for about 10 years, so we’re safe till they’re, like, 15. It still elicits a laugh though, so I keep it in my repertoire. However, I stopped making jokes about allergies to dust and cat hair/dander because, well, it’s not a joke here. As you will soon see.⁵

5. Foreshadowing. Just sayin'.

6. Homer knows.

7. Frigg off—I work at home. What would you wear?

8. I shift between two pairs of jeans, wearing one pair till they get to the point where they walk themselves to the laundry room. This pair, while on the floor, had still not made the laundry dash and could thus be considered the “clean” pair. Everything being relative and all.

9. I know, you’re shocked.

10. ‘Cause we’re not talking a few drops of pee here. It was like one of those fem hy commercials, without the blue dye. Or the fem hy. Which, really, could have made this whole post irrelevant.

11. With apologies to Winston Churchill.

12.  I only have one cat, but whenever we go away and have friends looking after her, I put out three litterboxes so my kitty-sitters don’t have to change the litter while we’re gone and Snowdrop doesn’t have to claw her way into the crawl space to find a fresh place to take a poo. Hey—I may be a slob, but I’m a considerate slob. I just haven’t gotten around to consolidating the boxes since our recent trip,¹³ so my laundry-dropping target range is still vast.

13. I know, you’re shocked.

14. My to do list requires it’s own dedicated blog.¹⁵

15. Hell, my to do list requires its own bloody postal code.