Priorities

I have a lot to do. School started today and my house looks like a group of drunk frat boys decorated. I just didn't see the point in the last week in trying to keep the house picked up after my children. Despite my constant haranguing, they did as they are wont and left their stuff all over the house, preferring television, swimming, playing with friends, and playing video and computer games to cleaning up after themselves. I, who was busy shuttling people to various big box stores to spend my retirement savings on school supplies, had neither the time nor the energy to fight entropy.

And so, I am now living in our neighborhood's version of Delta Tau Chi. Well, if dirty socks, dog hair, and video game controllers were beer cans, kegs, and dirty underwear, anyway. It's a smidge unkempt around here is my point.

I have about 4 loads of laundry to fold. (I'm not sure what constitutes a load at your house, but at our house, a load=filling the washer to capacity and then stuffing in about 6 more items and asking your 13 year old to help you close the washer door. My appliances hate me.) Every flat surface in my kitchen is covered and needs to be decluttered. And the dirty socks and shoes in the family room? The dirty sock/shoe to person ratio is about 4 to 1. The dog hair bunnies have dust bunnies. The globs of toothpaste in the kids bathroom sinks have grown, if not to toothpaste mountains, then at least toothpaste foothills. There are 11 post it notes on the cabinets above the desk where I am writing this. They all contain urgent messages/reminders of things that I need to get done. They have been up there for three weeks. I like to think of them as my own Mondrian-type art. It makes me feels sophisticated. In a hillbilly sort of way. My vacuum cleaner has been sitting in a corner mocking me since last weekend when my beloved installed some new appliances in the kitchen and I had 3 minutes to string together to vacuum up styrofoam from the packaging.

I hear that swine flu is making the rounds at the State Fair. I am afraid that the health department will be ringing my doorbell any day now, quarantining us as Ground Zero for swine flu virus development, such is the state of our piggishness around here.

And yet, in spite of all that, here I am sitting at my computer all lackadaisical-like, typing my little heart out because I feel as if I have been maintaining radio silence for the better part of 3 months, only emerging from the underground to publish birthday posts, and dagnabbit! I am ready to write a little more. Priorities, people. I has 'em! I can totally ignore all the dust bunnies, dirty socks, and the lady from the health department on my doorstep while I am sitting here writing. You know where I learned all my mad prioritizing skillz?

From my children.