Night and Day Difference

Remember how I said I was going to try and spend every evening now that daylight savings time is over (since it gets dark so early) doing at least one small thing to keep the ball rolling in my efforts to get my house in shape by next week? Well, that was laughable. Here is a picture of me at the end of each day as the sun sets:

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Even trying to do one small thing each evening has been a flop, except a couple of nights ago when I polished a bunch of silver and then last night when I ran errands.

However, I have been an entirely different creature in the mornings. Here I am before work each day:

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I have been starting at 6:30 each morning rearranging furniture, dragging things to the road and packing them up in my car and hauling them over to bless my friend through the filling of her garage with my stuff. Ain't I sweet? Just call me Taz, or maybe Spaz. Either one about sums it up. By 8:30 when I leave for work, I've usually gotten quite a bit checked off my list.

Today has been all about hauling garbage to the road, hauling rusty metal toolboxes to the garage and rearranging out there and of course bleaching my finger tips off. They are literally bleeding. I got back to work on my second round of ridding the bathroom grout and caulk of moldy or dark areas, as well as attempting it in the kitchen, around the bathroom sinks, etc. I also bleached my front porch and am doing a zillion other caulking, cleaning and laundry chores. 

There was also a valiant attempt to fix the bathroom window so that it would open, but I didn't have the strength to get the crank to turn, even though I used W-D 40 and tried to take it apart and also hit it repeatedly with a hammer to loosen it. I finally had to admit defeat and move on.  The window hasn't worked in at least 20 years so I wasn't pinning my hopes on it, and I wasn't going to waste the entire afternoon on futility when new must-do's keep popping up with everything I accomplish. 

If I can make my fingers cooperate above and beyond the call of duty, I'm going to start painting a few pieces of furniture tomorrow. I saved that job until all the main grunge jobs were done. Like a reward of sorts. I've gotten a lot of projects done inside and out, and my house is wonderfully junk free (for the most part) and it feels wonderful to have my home back without all the excess stuff to climb around and try to make my way though. No one else will grasp all that I've done around here, but I do, and it feels good to have so much behind me and to know things are fresh, clean and cleared out. 

Hold on! Newsflash! 

After I wrote that no one would grasp all I had done around here, Casey came home for a break between shifts at work and told me I had done more around here than one person ought to have to do alone. What!? Did my ears deceive me? She noticed. I took that as a compliment and then shot a motherly look in her direction meant to imply, "Well, you could have helped." She was busted. Her eyes went wide and a slow smile emerged as she realized that she had snagged herself in her statement. Well, frankly, she's always at work and school while I'm going all Tazmanian on the house so she doesn't have much time to join me in the madness (and frankly she doesn't share my (shall we say) passion for cleaning and preparing.) But I tell ya, having two more hands on deck during cleaning frenzies would be nice.

Hopefully I'll be back in the swing of blog life next week. For now, I've only got three more days to get everything crossed off my to-do list before company arrives, and then we host Family Game Day 2012 on the day before Thanksgiving. (Uh, oh, I still need to figure out for sure what I'm going to feed everyone!) 

We're all looking forward to the Thanksgiving festivities! 

Hope you all are going to spend some good time with your family and friends this Thanksgiving as well! Let me know what you have planned.