Spring Break

We are spending Spring Break at home this year -- no money for fancy trips anywhere -- but I think it's going to be OK. We have a lot of ideas for inexpensive day trips and other activities, plus I'm going to try to get some work done.

On Thursday/Friday, just before the break started, we got 13 inches of snow. Very wet, compacted snow, just really a big big dump of the stuff. I thought we might have a snow day Friday, but no dice. We hadn't had any snow at all for about 6 weeks, so that's been interesting. Here's the front yard, looking toward Clifford's house.

And here's the backyard.


Not a lot of melting today, but tomorrow's supposed to be in the 50s and Monday and Tuesday in the 60s, so we'll lose a lot of it then. The forsythia was in bloom before this happened -- wonder how many flowers will be left once the snow melts.

I stayed inside all day today, except for one trip to the recycling bin. Tomorrow I'll get some air. It's library day.

I made three tentative plans for the nine days we have off (two weekends plus one work week). I planned that I would (1) do paperwork (grading, class prep, taxes) for half an hour every day; (2) clean up something every day; and (3) do something fun with the twins every day.

I got up very late today, but once I was up, I felt like getting something done. Around 1:30 pm Rocket Boy took the twins to the Video Station and out for coffee. While they were gone I worked on grading papers for about 45 minutes, so that was #1. After they got home, I got started with #2, cleaning up something, and ended up spending over two hours on it. I should have taken a "before" picture, but here is the "after" picture.

See the red wastebasket next to the desk? Where that stands there used to be a gigantic moving box, that stuck out into the space beyond the desk and the space under the desk and everywhere, plus it split a month or so ago, so papers were falling out of it and it was driving me crazy. So today I emptied the box. About 2/3 of the contents went in the recycling bin and the rest went into -- don't kill me -- another box. I should have filed the contents, not just put them in a box, but my space is not clean enough yet to file anything. I still can't even open one file cabinet drawer, due to this other mess, below:

Quite a bit of this mess was actually in the big, split apart moving box too, but I had to take it out and pile it up here because of the splitting apart problem. So, truly, I only dealt with a portion of the box today. Still, the box is gone -- out on the porch, headed for the recycling bin -- so I'm making progress. And this mess can be dealt with on another day this week. 

It has competition, however. The house is full of messes. I'd like to work on this one tomorrow. I hate having a messy bureau top. I can never find anything. Most of it is scarves and things -- shouldn't take me two hours to clean it up.

But there's also this one, on the desk in our bedroom, which is nightmarish:

And I also really need to deal with this one, since it's in the living room and all:

I actually took photos of 10 different messes around the house, not even counting Rocket Boy's own personal messes and the messes in the twins' room. We are really living in squalor at the moment, and it's depressing. It's very hard to be happy when you live in a big mess.

The one thing I didn't do today was #3, something fun with the twins! And they were unhappy about that, kept trying to get me to stop working on the box and come play with them. So I'll have to do better tomorrow.

I feel really good after today, though. If I could deal with even one more mess this week, I'd feel great. I had been planning to leave all these messes until May, when my classes are done but the twins are still in school. Imagine if I could get several messes cleaned up this week -- just think what I'd have time for in May!

Well, one thing at a time. Tomorrow is Sunday. I will try to work for half an hour, clean the top of my dresser, and do something fun with the twins. Spring Break at home is going to be just fine.