• I’m seeing a pattern here

    Date: 2009.03.16 | Category: sometimes I ramble | Tags:

    A few months ago I stared to ween myself off the internet a bit. (Don’t worry internet, I’m not quitting you.) Back when I was working for That Place That I Used To Work That Shall Not Be Named On This Blog my work/life balance was whacked. In a nutshell there was no life, there was just work and sleep and if I was having a really good week, grocery shopping. Then that went away  (yayyyyyyyy) and I went in the other direction where I really wasn’t working much and I was getting used to this new life of mine in Ottawa. Somewhere along the line I realized that I was probably spending a wee bit too much time online.

    My solution to this was “Internet-Lite” days. Originally they were going to be “Internet-Free” but I realized I’d fail at that very quickly. Every time I tried I’d realize that what I was planning to cook for dinner was somehow connected to the interent. Internet-Lite it was. Internet-Lite is working for me. I can still pop on and check my email, monitor blog comments, look up a recipe, go to IMDB to figure out who that person in the movie is, etc. The point is that I don’t linger. Twitter & Chatter are generally avoided.

    However I am noticing a pattern. You see I find myself with the need to do something with those hours. Just knowing how many hours I have ahead of me makes me feel antsy. Like I should be doing Something, since I have All This Time. Sure, I could do normal things like laundry and dusting and sweeping but why on earth would I want to do that? Often I find I’m too restless to sit still long enough for a movie or to read a book (yes, I said I’m too antsy to read). So I find myself informing Lee we are going to *insert random household project here*.

    It’s how we ended up clearing out the pantry and organizing the spice cabinet one Sunday. It’s how we ended up arranging our books by colour another Sunday. And this weekend it’s how we spent about 6 hours doing a deep clean and reorganization of our office. The storage closet in there was cleaned out. We threw out bags of trash that we had once upon a time convinced ourselves were Importan Items and Memories. Ok, most of it was Lee’s. I’ve moved too much in the past 5 years to have accumulated quite that much. Lee is a packrat. He got rid of a lot of stuff this weekend that he’d been holding onto for a long time (and I didn’t push…ok, only a little bit). Furniture was rearranged. An entire army of dust bunnies were extinguished. Goodwill got a small load of donations and while we were out we treated ourselves to Dairy Queen sundaes.

    Sunday evening I could not sit still and if you walked into our apartment you would have found me sitting on the floor killing more dust bunnies that were inhabiting our baseboards. (I do think that part of that was induced by my wrist flaring up again and I still can’t bake or knit and it hurts to hold a book for too long. Ditto yoga. Cooking with a brace on is a pain in the butt. It is very, very frustrating.)

    All this is fantastic but this is the thing – sooner or later I’m going to run out of rooms to clean top to bottom and crap to throw out. Sooner or later dust bunnies will be extinct. Sooner or later I’m going to have to figure out something else to do with all. that. time.

    If I’m initiating cleaning (I *hate* cleaning) now what am I going to do it when it runs out?  (Don’t bother suggesting I clean your place – the compulsion doesn’t work that way.) I’ll have to get creative. And that is a scary, scary thought.