Dec. 18 Try: Cleaning House #reverb 10

Dec. 18  Try. What do you want to try next year? Is there something you wanted to try in 2010? What happened when you did / didn't go for it?   -Kaileen Elise

This is a mundane answer on one level, but a more serious one on another.  I want to try to organize my house.   This year, it was a real struggle for me, especially because I was off my feet for 4 months.  Right before my foot surgery, I had had a hypo manic episode, and one of the characteristic behaviors of hypo mania is frenzied cleaning.  This is not universal, but is so common as to be considered a warning sign to see your doctor.  It is also a source of jokes among those of us who find cleaning very difficult, except for these outbursts.

I was never really taught how to clean.  My mother had a cleaning lady for as long as I can remember, and she felt that teaching us housework was sexist.   Of course what was sexist was that they weren't expecting boys to do housework, not that girls had to do it.  But at any rate, it means the few cleaning skills I have are self-taught.

In addition, because bipolar illness causes brain damage to certain parts of the brain, I suffer cognitive defects in my Executive Function, which is sort of the overarching cognitive meta-structure that allows one to live an orderly and organized day to day life.  I flat out can't do this.  I also have bad impulse control.  It is connected to damage done to the frontal lobe, Phineas Gage via neurotransmitters.  Well okay, not as bad as Phineas Gage.

Anyway, I went into my foot surgery with the house cleaner than it had been in some time.  Which meant it was clean, but crammed with "stuff."  And things have deteriorated from that point.

So I have made a couple of decisions about how to approach this in the coming year:  I am going to throw being Green to the winds for a little bit, and use all the "magic sponges" and "swiffers," and wasteful but convenient things:  The easier the better.  And then, we are going to invest in some storage.  I am already measuring spaces for shelves and storage units.  We are buying shoe racks, and hangers.  We are going to make a real go of it this year.  We kind of landed in this duplex in June of 2006, when DH lost his license due to a seizure:  Where he was working at the time was a mile from this house.  Now he actually commutes to an office two blocks away from where we lived before we landed here.  But we never sat down and "organized" the place, the furniture is pretty much where we dumped it upon arrival.  And while this is technically not the smallest place we have ever lived, the smaller place was designed to maximize use of space.  And we owned less 11 years ago, of course.

So we have never really pulled this place together.  We are always soooo proud of ourselves when we do even the tiniest amount of decorating.  For instance, At Goodwill last week  I found a matching trio of colorful but muted cushions that look great against our beige-y sectional.  Oh yes, I am still "thrifting"; I am taking a break from the daily photographs of outfits while I work on this #reverb10 challenge.  

Anyway, not my most riveting entry, but I needed to start catching up!  Part of the reason I am behind is this has been a very challenging week, for all the reasons I have been discussing this month, and I now need to sleep.  So this is a bit rough, sorry for any garbled sentences.