Details, Details

Things are insane. That's become the norm, but still. They are. My house is a wreck, and the parts of it that are the wreckiest are my parts. I am behind in my work work, my freelance work, my house work. I literally can't use my desk any more for the piles of stuff on it...and on my chair, and on the floor spaces that surround my chair.

And so, when I have a spare 15 or 20 minutes, what do I do? I take a toothpick and scrape around the edges of the stovetop, to see if I can get that thin line of grease to go away. I take a toothbrush and try to scrub around and between the hinges of the toilet seat in the kids' bathroom to see if I can make that SMELL go away. (Little boy + Bad aim = Dear GOD it's like living in a frickin' ZOO.) I grab a Magic Eraser and try to scrub away the probably-decades-old rust stains around the faucet handles in the kids' shower...the shower nobody uses because it's too small and the pipes are rusty (hence the stains) and the hot water goes from nonexistent to scalding when you breathe in the direction of the hot-water handle.

I try to do something that can be done. That can be finished in those rare, spare 15 minutes. That can make me feel like I've accomplished something.

And I have. The grease is gone. The smell has abated (at least until the next time N uses the bathroom and gets distracted). The rust stains are incrementally less obvious.

But the piles are still there, the work still undone, the desk still unusable, and the chaos still beyond overwhelming. Funny, that. Funny how the lack of grease around the stovetop's edges didn't change everything, didn't somehow subdue the insanity that surrounds me.

Funny. Ha. Ha. Ha.