Mornings

I am a morning person. Very rarely do I say bad things about mornings (although sometimes I used to faux-sympathise with Starbucks customers when they complained that 8 a.m. was "too early" and I had already been up for over four hours).

This morning, though? I would like to rewind and get a do-over, please.

It actually kind of set up last night. I'm trying to organise a group of youth to go to a Christian concert at Six Flags this Saturday (and we actually have a lot of interest, coming, as it does, on the heels of a youth retreat that everyone seemed to enjoy very much. More about that in a happier post after I get this out of my system). Although there is a lot of interest among the teens, I'm having a terrible time recruiting chaperones, and furthermore, logistics are proving challenging for more than one family involved. This has elicited some tense moments and is stressing me out a little.

Meanwhile, Oscar had a tummy ache again for some reason, and something even less pleasant than usual was issuing out of his hindquarters last night. I assumed, when I put him in his crate in the kitchen and went upstairs to bed myself, that if he were in distress and needed to go out urgently, he would whimper enough for me, a generally light sleeper, to wake up. This has happened in the past.

Evidently, however, I'm still catching up on the sleep I missed at "Conference." I slept through the whimpering. I spent most of the morning washing Oscar, washing his toys, washing his crate, using up rolls of paper towels (so much for being an environmentally conscious hippie), and then trying to clean up myself.

I'm still not sure I should've brought him to work with me today . . . but the alternative would have been to leave him in his crate all day and come home and repeat the whole wash cycle all over again. And he's doing okay right now. Which is good, because when I got to church I had a phone call from one of our Sunday school volunteers who isn't happy with her assignment and I had to try to convince her that she still wants to help out.

All of this pales in comparison with, say, being persecuted for one's faith in India, but it's still super-annoying, and I'd still like to be able to hit a restart button.

Clean Up

Today I cleaned my house.

You may say, "You announce this as if it is an uncommon occurrence."

Well that, my friend, is because it is. It is. I used to say that the reason I cleaned my house so rarely was because I had to clean so much at Starbucks that by the time I got home, I didn't have the energy for it. And given the constant cleaning that goes on at Starbucks, this could have been a valid reason. However, anyone who has known me in any of my previous incarnations (college student, nanny, missionary, living history museum interpreter) will know that it's all a smoke screen, because I didn't clean any more when I was those things than I do now. (When I was a nanny at least the family I worked for hired a cleaner . . . although she wasn't that great.)

Today I had to sit down with my computer for half an hour just so Oscar could settle because he is so not used to me spending most of a day off moving all over the house and actually being productive. And I'm fairly certain that at first when I pulled out the Lysol spray, he thought he must have done something wrong, because the last time I used it around here was back when he used to . . . well, you know what he used to do in the house.

It's not that I'm a slob, exactly. It's just that I'm kind of a methodical (by which I actually mean slow) cleaner, so that it takes about half the time to mess the place up again that it takes me to clean it. (Take today, for instance. I cleared off all the kitchen counters and scrubbed them, and then the Other Jenn came over for dinner and I made a chicken satay in the electric frying pan on the kitchen island . . . and suddenly there was grease everywhere. I cleaned that up right away. I'm just saying.) The feeling of futility that hangs over the whole prolonged enterprise just kind of daunts me.

But I have to say, I do enjoy a clean house. For at least five minutes.