I Am Cleaning

I am cleaning,

I swear.

I come up with these crazy plans.

These obsessive-compulsive ideas that I cannot shake.

And this idea I have dubbed "The Fifty".

The Fifty is the number I have vowed I would undertake each day during the week of Thanksgiving, beginning today: the Saturday prior.

From my home I would purge myself of 50 things every day.

It started with twenty.

But then I realized it would be easy to cheat since each scrap of paper I rid this home of would count as one. You know all those scraps?  The receipts you thought "just in case" you should hold onto... the mail... the coupons from Kohl's latest flyer (that turned into the flyer from summer now past...), the work faxes and memos and other idle paper messes that need to get into the recycling bin, like, yesterday.

So 20 became 50, and I am intent on meeting that goal.

Any combination of unused toys and unworn clothes that will make it to Salvation Army, any fashion choices of yesteryear that I have spent too much time wondering if they would return to grace us again (except, I will never get rid of my cherry Doc Martens, Ef you very much.).

There are the novelty gifts many someones gave me with good intentions, like a penis shaped drinking straw (oh, how I'll miss you, perfectly good plastic penis!) and the dog and cat toys and one very adorable Santa costume that I bought for Penny for her first Christmas at our casa. She loathed me then, and I shall now pass that loathing on to another pet owner.

There're too many games in my closet, because I love a good game... but Lloyd doesn't like games and by the time Sayler loves games our edition of "Friends: Scene It" it will seem archaic and meaningless. I can hear her and her friends laughing at her old mommy now when I suggest it for their slumber party.

And though I swear she will know what "The Gellar Cup" signifies and she will adore Jennifer Aniston the way Ariel and I do, I am resigned to knowing this game will serve another family more happily until she finds a game more befitting of her generation.

But I am here, now sitting amongst my grand intentions and about twenty piles of stuff scattered among the rooms of my home and fifty is seeming like, you know, whatever is a lot more than fifty. 

I have officially reached that point where, in an effort to clean my home, I have made it anything but.

I am feeling a little overwhelmed by the stripped-down bed that is now holding lots of laundry, most of which is clean, some of which is wet because I own too many "hang-dry" only items (seriously, why must all of my favorite, prettiest items of clothing be so much work to wash?), and some of the laundry is for the Goodwill and some is for Ariel and some is to be passed on to my friends and now I officially can't breathe trying to remember where to put what where.

But I will get to my fifty today. So help me.

And it won't include my cherry Doc Martens... seriously... you're not getting them, so don't even bother asking.