We all know I have issues, right?

Good.

On Friday . . . when I should have been basking in a kid-free morning while the kids were at my mom’s house, I was cleaning.

I’d been putting off any and all cleaning tasks all week under the assumption that I was going to start feeling better the next day.

Except that I felt worse each day than I had the day before.

And the house looked worse each day than it had the day before. 

When Friday arrived, I had no choice but to get to work.  My in-laws were scheduled to “drop by” to bring their dog here for us to watch while they went to a family reunion.  If the MIL is coming, you can’t put off cleaning any longer.

Sick or not.

I was extra-irritated with myself because I hate needing to spend two hours just to get ready for a Friday morning visit when no one is expecting perfection anyway.  I love it when my in-laws drop by and I’m grateful for the chance to pay back a little bit for all the times they’ve kept our dog while we go on vacation.

The stress over making the house look presentable?  I only have myself to blame for that. 

So I dragged my achy and miserable body around the house for two hours . . . picking up, dusting, vacuuming, and swishing out toilets.  Amazingly, the house looked pretty good after those two hours, with minimal master-bedroom shoving. (An impossibility pre-blog.)

But I still tried this old technique.  It’s a safety net I give myself.

Create a scene that shows I’m in the middle of a project.

I have my reasons. 

If someone walks in and sees this project in progress, they assume:

1.  That I didn’t do any special cleaning for their Friday morning drop by visit.

2.  That if I didn’t do any special cleaning, this must be what my house looks like at any random moment in time.

3.  That a missed Nerf dart or dirty sock or dust ball is totally understandable in a house that looks this decent on a day when, obviously, no one did any special cleaning.

I’m pretty sure no one realized that an hour and a half earlier . . . I couldn’t use this table for a project because it was completely covered in junk.