This is exactly what happened, without exaggeration. And while reading it, some of you might recall a similar email funny that has circulated, and then some of you might think twice about email forwards and think maybe they are absolutely true and that maybe that check from Microsoft is on its way right now?
In any case, after hosting a family gathering one cold Sunday afternoon, I began to clean up the kitchen only to realize that the rest of my immediate family was fast asleep to the hum of a random afternoon movie. Including my husband.
I didn’t want to wake them with the clanging of dishes, so I snuck upstairs to put away some laundry. But in my room I found a paper that belonged in my office which is really less of an office and more like the black hole of everything that doesn’t have a real place. So I ventured down to the office with socks still strewn all over my bed and realized that while the rest of the gang was sleeping, it’d be a good time to tackle this project.
Sifting through papers and odds and ends and scraps of fabric, I found expired gift cards and recipes I’d been looking for for months. I wanted to put one of those recipes right in my kitchen so I wouldn’t lose it again, so I walked out of the black hole, past the sleeping family, and put it on the baker’s rack.
Which also held a library book that I needed to return.
So I went out to my car to put it in and while out there saw that I didn’t bring in my purse, which I normally keep in the mudroom. Walking into the mudroom, I noticed that the lightbulb was out and I needed to change it. The lightbulbs are kept in the laundry room.
To the laundry room I went. I didn’t find any lightbulbs, but I found the new 2010 calendar I had been looking for forever which would come in handy while sorting through papers in the black hole. I started to walk it back over to my office when I noticed that the family was starting to wake up.
“Aha! A chance to finish the dishes!” I thought.
Once again loading the dishwasher and clearing the counters, a rumble in someone’s tummy definitely sounded like “we should order pizza.” And so we did.
Where were the coupons? On my desk. In the office. Yikes.
But back in the kitchen, I might as well keep cleaning so we have a place to actually eat. Sitting while eating, I’ve heard, is quite nice.
I decided that there was so much going on that we’d use some of the leftover paper plates from the party, but since we didn’t need all of them, I would put the rest away in the pantry where I keep them all in a large plastic tote. The tote, however, was unorganized thanks to my lovely children.
“If I don’t get this done now, I’ll never do it,” I said, and there, in the middle of the messy kitchen with the messier office and the dark mudroom and the laundry explosion, I re-organized the paper plates tote.
And with the click of the lid, I had finally accomplished one thing, start to finish, that evening.
With just a few minutes before the pizza arrived, I started to wipe down the kitchen counters and happened to pass the coffee maker. Dirty rag still stationed next to the filters, I had just put a pot on when the doorbell rang.
After dinner and with coffee in hand, I went back to the office only to find my computer sitting there, pretty much telling me not to clean, but that I had to write down the evening’s turn of events. And maybe forward a few emails.
Another case of a focus-free afternoon
