Well hello there. I’m back from my travels. So I thought I’d pop in to say hello. (Cue: “Just popping in to say cuckoo. Cuck-oo!”) (Sorry. Couldn’t resist. And If you didn’t get that musical theatre reference,* I’m not quite sure what to say to you.)
It’s been a crazy couple of weeks in our household, what with all the continent-jumping we’ve been doing. And I’ve responded to the jet-lag induced craziness by…cleaning.
Yes, that’s right. Cleaning. It is Spring after all. (75 and sunny when we touched down at Heathrow Friday night, thank you very much.)
Since we arrived home, I’ve been a veritable machine, clearing out books…toys…clothing…videos. Heck, even the decade-old double stroller that once attached to our bicycles is finally getting tossed! (Why, you may ask, do *still* have a double stroller when our children are ten and seven?) And well you might ask. Rest assured that the responsibility does not lie with yours truly. But thank goodness we hung onto that sucker for as long as we did, as it makes an incredibly useful device for transporting said goodies to the upcoming Nearly New Sale, where said stroller will remain…
There’s nothing quite like a good, old-fashioned de-clutter to relax the mind and bring peace to the soul. But I’m not going to stop there. Having tackled the dining room, living room and both bedrooms, the next target is…drum roll please…my inbox.
As I write, I have some 2,896 messages in my inbox. (Half of which probably say something like “Clean out your inbox!”) And while I was going to push off the horrid task of sitting down, rolling up my sleeves and ploughing through that bad boy until next week – after getting a few blog posts under my belt – I then thought, why wait?
After all, I’m already on a spring cleaning roll. So I want to capitalize on that momentum before it disappears.
Plus, I’m not sure if I’ve shared this little tidbit with you, but the country in which I currently reside (that would be the U.K.) has basically shut down for the month of April. Between the gi-normous Easter break they take every year, coupled with assorted Bank holidays (European Labor Day is next Monday), not to mention that whole Royal Wedding lollapalooza they’ve got going on later this week (and we all know how excited I am about *that*), this place has basically been a ghost town for the entire month. Every other day, it seems, is a public holiday.
A case in point: My son will have attended school for three whole days this month; my daughter, a whopping eight. Which means that I’ve been a bit short of free time of late.
So – channelling my old friend Naomi Williams – I’ve decided to go with the spring cleaning mania that would appear to be coursing through my veins, rather than resisting it. I’ve cleared out my inbox before with terrific results. But this time I’m going to go medieval. I’m giving myself five days to reduce my inbox – if not to zero – than to as close to zero as I deem reasonable.
So wish me luck. I can’t wait to come back to our conversation. So much has happened over the holidays that I’m dying to share with you.
But for now – as we say in The Sound of Music* – so long, farewell…
Image: Spring Cleaning – #3 by lastonein via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.
