Recurring nightmare?

There's been a wee exchange - not really a wonderful one, but there you are - on Kimberly's blog today, about coping with housekeeping, a full-time job, and the necessity to do things like blogging. Ok, so you don't find the last a necessity? Some of us do - or it might be reading, or talking on the phone, or climbing mountains: life-enhancing activities to which we feel drawn and which pull us away from tedious but worthy tasks.

Since retiring from paid employment in a situation where your every move was controlled by bells - right down to that pressing comfort break, as they call it in polite circles - I realise once again how much harder it is, in a way, to cope with freedom. If you have to make up your own timetable, compensating tomorrow for tasks left undone today, things can slide. Boy, can they slide. But I reckon I've hit on the solution as far as routine housework is concerned. (I'm not talking about cooking here. I like to eat, and I like to eat well)

If you don't do, say, the vacuuming on the appointed day one week, make no attempt to do it a couple of days later when you could be out in the sun which has suddenly appeared. Leave it till the day you've designated comes round again. You won't really notice, and no-one else will notice if you don't draw their attention to the stour. When you get round to doing it a week later, the carpets will look so good by comparison that you'll get double the satisfaction. See, housework never goes away. Never. So you're never really on top of it. Ergo, it's not worth getting in a tizz about it. Get on with living instead.

Just make sure you live with someone who agrees with you ....