31 days: blessings of a rough week

I was super-excited about last week's Martha challenges because... well, I am a Monica, and having someone tell me to reorganize all my kitchen hidey-holes was just that thrilling.  The first day, I flung open my cabinets and started looking around them to decide what to clean out and reorder.

Hmmm.

I like my kitchen, but it has a certain appearance of disorder because of the height and depth of some of the cabinets.  Not everything fits together like I'd prefer.  My pie tins are on a different side of the oven from my cookie sheets.  The tall maple syrup bottle has to stand next to my Sam's-sized Bisquick, while my blueberry syrup nestles behind my stack of skillets.

This sets my teeth on edge, but I know where everything is.  (And Husband knows, too, for the most part!)  It's been that way for almost a year and a half now.  So as I surveyed my seeming lack of organization, I knew that, if I set to redoing everything, I would end up with the contents of my cabinets strewn across the counters... and then put back pretty much where they are now.  And that, my friends, seemed a colossal waste of time.

So instead of tackling a kitchen reorganization with relish (like I'm normally prone to do a couple of times a year), I just looked.  I moved a few things that had gotten out of place, and I tossed or used up a few pantry items that were perched precariously on their shelves.

And then I finished my Martha challenges for the week!  My upstairs windows are sparkling, and my kitchen floors are swept.  My wonderful husband has volunteered to finish the floors since I am dreadfully unskilled with a mop.

Last week was a good week for me to quasi-ignore three challenges because my baby was growing some teeth and needed a lot of attention.  And my husband was gone for four days.  It was definitely more of a "keep my head above water" week.

This week, I began with a vehement refusal to accept the challenge to wash my living room walls and dust the ceilings.  And I felt good about that, too. :)  I've been spending time on the Mary challenges and working to personalize the planner page that my sister blogged about last week; that fits with a lot of the Mary challenges and is something I've wanted to do to help myself for some time now.

So this isn't a very exciting 31 Days post, but it's an update.  It reminds me and my handful of readers that I'm still in this!  I'm not going to give up the challenge... but it's nice that I can consider some of them Already Complete!