Clean up on Page 10

Tip of the Day: finally tried out the Overdrive app on my iPhone today, so I can get books easily from my library. Love it!

This week has been filled with cleaning, cleaning, sprucing up, and more cleaning. I definitely come from the group of people that believe messy environments are the sign of a creative mind, and choose to clean for only one of two reasons:

1.) When you have to flip through 100 papers to find the one you need. (Or you know...you have to start hand washing dishes because there's no clean bowls left to put your Lucky Charms in.)
2.) Or when someone is coming to visit.

This week's reason for The Great Clean centers on No. 2. Not only do we have company coming this weekend, but we also have hundreds of people that will be traipsing in our house for a Historic Home and Garden Tour. And since they have to fork over $10 to see all the homes and gardens on the tour, I felt I owed it to them to at least dust.

But I will have to say that I have found myself on multiple occasions this week just stuffing random papers into drawers, throwing things into closests, and taking more and more items down into the basement to sit out of view.

And after doing all this, I'm just now realizing that it's going to take me twice as long to put it all back to it's rightful place when the home tour is over. And if I'd just taken the extra time upfront to do the proper cleaning then I probably won't be wanting to bang my head against the door when I have to clean again in a few days.

I'm guilty of doing this with my writing as well. Sometimes I'm lazy and want to shortcut my revisions or I think "oh this simple solution will still work. It might not be the best, but it will be ten times faster and easier."

And you know what...in the end it's not worth it. Because it almost always needs redone.

If only I'd listened to my mother when I was younger and learned the proper way to clean, maybe both my house and my current work in progress wouldn't be such a mess.

Oh well...it's a good thing Creative Minds are born from chaos...

Hmmm....maybe my coffee table/trunk really would make a better laundry basket in the basement?

--Emily

* Note: this is not my office. To prove it you can find the picture posted on this site and track down the real owner of this office. But I will say at least the papers seem to be in neat piles! That's points in my book.