Disaster Cat Experiments with Self-Help Website
Greetings everyone out there in Blog land. This week, we may actually have something to write about in addition to the saga of cats and other critters. Though for those who have asked, Thor the Cat is now doing fine even if his ear will always be bent sideways. This week he has decided that the stuffed animals in the bedroom are prey...nothing like finding a well chewed stuffed Wolf-let in your bed. I'm sure the Eco Store had this in mind when they came out with the products...
Anyway, last night I was searching around on the web for nothing in particular. I was reading a website aimed mostly at scratch cooking when one of the ladies on the list mentioned a house-keeping program they had found helpful. Now, anyone who has ever visited our house knows that we may have a house, and we may be keeping it, but the two words put together do not really describe our living quarters. We have a lovely, Georgian "Big" House (meaning its Big by the pre-Independence social structure, its about the size of an Mid-Western American Farm house) and filled with what Real Estate Companies love to call "features." Or, I guess they would be features if you could only see them. Sadly, most of the time our antique stair case is cluttered with swords, armor bits, period clothing, spinning and other items unloaded from the car after SCA events. Much of the time they sit there until we have guests (at which point The Lizard instigates a 52 pickup routine and throws it in another room) or it goes back into the car for the next event. Which ever comes first. So much for our "Period" Georgian Entryway, that we were promised on our Real Estate Brochure.
At the moment, we do have a real Drawing Room. Thanks mostly, again, to the persistence of The Lizard who got tired of looking at a fabric warehouse in front of the picture window. Now everything from the drawing room now lives stacked on the upper landing of the stair case. Where we are free to walk around piles of it as we go between the bedrooms or my workroom. There's a table under all of it somewhere that is supposed to be my sewing table. Someday I may even get to see it again.
I won't even discuss other areas of the house, like the dreaded kitchen. My bedroom is all right because I have a nice lady who comes in for a few hours twice a week and does the dishes and makes sure the bedroom floor is findable. But even there, the part under the bed has not been cleaned in..on..lets see, about seven years...SEVEN YEARS!!!! Oh my, I think its time to do something.
So, with this sort of background, I decided to check out this website. After all, it promised to be free, something always high on my list of websites. So often, the "free" websites are just excuses to sell you all sorts of stuff. This one, does have stuff you can buy, but also explains how to make everything yourself. Like most of the rest of them, it has a book attached to it. This one is even published (a lot of them are download only). And if this system really works, I may break down and by the book itself. Its just a paperback, but first we are going to give the system a trail run.
I spent about three hours last night looking over the entire website before I decided, OK I can do this, I can sign up for the e-mail list. Now this was a big step, by signing up for the list, I was pretty much agreeing to do what the little "suggestion" mails in the mail box ask me to. To be fair, the attractiveness of this system is that at the start, you do what are called "Baby Steps" and can ignore most of the messages. I gather the idea of the system is that many women never really learned to organize a house (or their lives for that matter) and that it takes a lot of time to for a place to get as messed up as ours is. And it will take a long time to find the floor again, so don't try to do it all at once. The site information promises that you just start out with 15 minutes a day and work up from there. The author sucks you in by suggestions that "anyone" can do "pretty much anything" for 15 minutes a day....hmmmm....Disaster Cat will see about that....
OK, so I have signed up for this system, sometimes known as "FLYING." Since I am just starting out, I am now a "FLYBABIE"...if I keep this up for a couple of years, I become a "FLYLADY"...never mind that this brings to mind the buzzing denizens of my kitchen. I try to ignore the image.
I get up this morning and see my "Welcome e-mail" which give me my first assignment which is TA DA! Clean the sink....er...a...just clean the sink? Yep that's it, only she means to really clean the sink. You don't even have to do the dishes first, but since for me, cleaning a sink means feeding the turf stove and heating water. I decide to do them first anyway. They didn't take very long because I have carefully avoiding doing much cooking this weekend, maybe I knew something like this was coming? Anyway, I manage to get the dishes started when my husband and our house-mate decide that the kitchen is a great place to hang out. So much for my attempts to look "normal."
But, since I have been doing the dishes a bit more often lately, no one thinks its really strange yet. That is until I fill up the sink with hot water and then add bleach to it. And then refuse to let anyone put dishes in it while it soaks. Now the Cat comes out of the Bag, when husband gets his worried look and asks, "Just what is the program you are doing anyway." His expression lets me know that if I have any plans on joining a cult or becoming a Step-ford Wife, I can just stop them, right now. I re-assure him that is just a housecleaning thing. The Lizard brightens up when I tell him the real object is to reduce household clutter (he's been trying to do this for months now). Unfortunately for both of us, most of the clutter belongs to my husband, followed by me. Meaning its hard for The Lizard to do much about it. Come to think of it, its going to be impossible for me to do much about husband's stuff either..but as the program says, one problem at a time....so back to the sink...
As I finish polishing my sink (with steel wool according the instructions) and then finish wiping it with a paper towel, I begin to wonder just what I've gotten myself into. I can stop at any time of course, I suspect many people give up after the first day. On day two you get to make the bed and get dressed in the morning. I gather that a lot of stay-at-home mom's on the list, start out by forgetting this step. I can see their point, if all you see all day is the two year old and the new one spitting up on your clothing, staying in a bathrobe does have its attractions. I have also realized, by now, that this website is assuming that many of its members are chronically depressed (which I imagine many stay at home moms and even more working women with children, probably are) and that some of this stuff is designed to help fight this. I note, somewhat re-assured, that a lot of the self-care routines I already do. OK, so I don't make the bed, but I do get dressed, brush my hair and teeth and bath regularly. I just don't pay the same attention to the coffee cups or the stair landing.
The other problem I have with this site (and if you take a look at it, some of you will see what I mean) is that it is mostly pink...and what is not pink is ...well, its lavender, actually. Even worse, some, but not all of the "happy, happy, joy, joy" banter is right out of a twelve step manuel. Having once lived with a dedicated 12 stepper, I only need to hear buzz words like "stinking thinking" or "Hugs" to get ready to flee a room in five seconds flat. I remind myself that I can make my own so-called "control" journal in any color I want. I do not have to spend 19.95 to get a pink and purple one with the FLY LADY angel on it. In fact, the nice FLY LADY who started the site has all the instructions for making one by my-self. If I want, I can have a black one with giant spiders on it if I like. In fact, since spider webs are part of the intended target, that might not be a bad idea. Sort of like putting up a fridge magnet of weighing scale, when you are on a diet.
Anyway, day of of FLYING, I now have a clean sink. I had a made bed, but I got back into it to take a nap....which I gather is not really part of program, but after cleaning my sink and doing the first page of my new (Grey) Control Journal - page one - Morning Routine...step 1 Wake Up....etc...I was so tired I decided I just couldn't stay awake any longer...I did however show that I was learning something. In order to avoid having to do step two all over again (get dressed) I just decided to take a nap in my cloths...
Hey, tomorrow I get my next assignment, but I have a nasty feeling I'll be supposed to clean the sink...AGAIN!
Stay Tuned for More Adventures of Disaster Cat!
For those who want to take a peak at the FLY LADY website its at: http://www.flylady.net/index.asp
(just be sure you are feeling up to lots of pink, before you go there *grin*)