Little victories

Do you remember this song? It was on Bob Seger's album "The Distance." I probably still own this album, somewhere.

I bought it for the guy who took me to his prom that year. I saw him yesterday. He works at Vanderbilt. There's not much to tell there. It was a short visit. It was nice to see him. In all the time I have been working there, that was the first time I saw him, & I wasn't along my usual route. I did know he worked there, but I don't think he knew I was there.

That really wasn't why I thought of the song, though. I was thinking of how far I've come in a week.

This time last week we were at Randy's sister's house, "recovering" from the wedding. I wasn't recovered yet. I think Randy & I were the only ones over 21 who weren't drinking. Well, maybe Randy's mom wasn't drinking. But, we both had to drive because Randy had too much stuff in his truck, so no drinking for me. I don't drink much anyway, but I could have really tied one on after that wedding.

I picked last week, that busy week, to start the FlyLady system for housekeeping. I have toyed with it before but really, I wasn't ready for it at the time. This time I knew I was ready to make some changes. I also knew I wouldn't be ready to jump in headfirst, as I usually do. FlyLady encourages people to take Baby Steps. At first I was skeptical, until I printed off the tips for Payroll SHEs (you really need to go to her website to understand all this!). Seeing that it worked for other people who work outside the home made it look a little more do-able for me. I didn't try to do everything at once, but I did go ahead & make a control journal right off. I still have a long way to go, but I've made a lot of progress.

FlyLady's system makes the weekends mostly chore-free by doing all the cleaning jobs during the week. I haven't quite graduated to that point yet. Last week, because there was a lot of laundry to do before the week began & because we were not home at all on Friday & Saturday, I washed clothes on Sunday. I did my night & morning routines through the weekend, then added the weekly plan on Monday.


This week's zone was the living room, which was probably the cleanest room in the house before I started. We just got rid of an old recliner & couch & moved in a new couch & loveseat, so we had already straightened up a bit. My weekly house blessing helped, & by the end of the week I had the laundry pretty well caught up. Today, though, I had to employ the crisis cleaning method because Rachel wanted to have a picnic for her friends. Over the last few weeks she has, a little at a time, straightened up her room a lot, because she wanted her friends to come over. Having the house in fair condition made it easy for me to focus on what needed doing: decluttering the dining room, making the garage presentable, & cleaning the countertop in the main bathroom.


So, the picnic was a success. Several kids are still here. I need to do a little cleanup work...gotta make sure everything got picked up in the yard.


Here are some pictures from the wedding last week. I realized that my MySpace link is just to the regular site. So, here you can see the photos in small form. Now you see what I meant about being the short, fat one! But I am not dwelling on that either, because I had another small victory yesterday. I noticed my scrub pants were kind of loose in the legs. Then I remembered that when I bought those scrubs back before Christmas (17 pounds ago) they were very tight. Now they aren't!

I told Randy I SHOULD have put those scrubs on LAST Friday when I needed an ego boost. Oh, well. Rome wasn't built in a day.