Today was a much better day than yesterday. Of course, a visit to the hairdresser always leaves me in better spirits. And I didn’t wake up with aching arms so that helped tremendously as well.

Today I did the Flylady missions from both yesterday and today. And tackled a few anti-procrastination day tasks. Including a few I didn’t even know I’d been ignoring.

Crumb tray of the toaster is now clean!

Started with yesterday’s task. Wash off the kitchen counters with hot soapy water. Sometimes (very rarely) lack of counter space is a good thing!  Also, took a minute to wipe down the items on the counter as well. And clean the crumb tray on the toaster as noted up above.

Before:After:

Can’t see a lot of difference in the two photos but the counter is cleaner. Or rather was clean. For a second. Ha!

The other task was to clean around the sink faucet. With a toothbrush. Our sink faucet is newer so I just used the Power Dawn soap and a rag. (Forgot to take an after photo!)

Still quite a few things I didn’t do today but her motto of Progress and not perfection is returning to my mind a bit. My main goal is to clean the sink each night.

A Few Anti-Procrastination Tasks Completed Today

They’ll sound simple but they were really bugging me so I’m glad to have them done.

• Took the tag off my new indoor fall rug for the front door. Seriously, it’s been there a week and I didn’t take the tag off of it. First, I wanted to make sure I liked it (I did) and then, I just kept thinking oh, I’ll do it in a minute. It’s done now.
• Clean out my purse. Pretty sure this is a Friday thing in Flylady land but it’s been at least 2-3 months. So many grocery lists! Now, I know exactly what I have in there including enough cash for a small cup of coffee out somewhere.
• Started to do my on-line training (finally) for work. However, I did stop as I have questions. Since I work tomorrow, I figured I should get answers before continuing.
• Made a plan with J to get together tomorrow and look at his dual credit English bill. He just needs to log on to his account so I can get it paid by the deadline.
• And used up the tomatoes on the counter before they went bad, BLT for lunch. It was yummy! Also, finally got around to making spicy black-eyed peas for dinner (with ham and cornbread)

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Tomorrow is back to the working world for me so we’ll see how I do on the tasks. However, the sink is already cleaned for tonight so I’m actually going to get to bed before 10:30. Exciting stuff.

Did you get any long neglected items crossed off your list today?

Trying very hard to post every day for this series. However, there’s not a lot to report today.

Not even a series of fun photos to share. I did not sleep well last night. Then, I decided to do some serious weed trimming in the lot next door. Seems we had a couple of people trying to get into the backdoor of that house (owner is currently not living there and the house/yard is in a bit of disarray).

Grumpy from not enough sleep. So sore from the weed trimming. Did I mention I used hedge trimmers and not a weed eater to do all this? Add in the adrenaline as I was so scared a snake was in the mess and the word for today was exhaustion. (Probably were snakes but thankfully, I didn’t see any. Wore my snow boots for the work just in case)

Am I making excuses? Probably. However, the only thing that happened in the housekeeping arena around here was the unloading/loading of the dishwasher. A switch of laundry from the washer to the dryer. No folding!

And I made dinner. Fried pork chops and baked potatoes. All I had in me tonight. Didn’t help that my husband came home and said trimming the crazy weeds (some were over my head!) in the back didn’t help and probably made it easier for people. UGH. And a second UGH for the sadness I felt as I cut down my bird habitat areas thinking it a necessary and helpful task for the safety of everyone. I did leave some areas, just wanted a line of sight to their backdoor.

So, I’ve rubbed on the Aspercreme and taken an Advil. Still hurt, being old and out of shape is no fun. Now, I’m off to clean the kitchen sink and go to bed.

So today started kitchen week in Flylady land. Kitchen week sounds like it should be more fun. Like I should be baking yummy treats all week or something.

Can I just confess something here? Cleaning the kitchen is one of my very least favorite chores. Honestly, if we were divvying up chores in a house, I’d pick the bathroom over the kitchen. Of course, that’s only if the living room and bedrooms were already taken. Unless they were teenager bedrooms, then I’d still take the bathroom, I think.

So, I did do most of the kitchen items on the “flight plan” for Monday.

• threw away 27 pieces of trash (counted recycle items in my total including the plastic containers I thought I might reuse…not like we don’t have enough containers already)
• cleared out our mail hotspot. Brought a few bills down here to pay. Recycled a few old catalogs I’d been keeping for their coupons, not counted in 27 items.
• Cleared most the clutter off the kitchen table. 
• Pantry peek was already done. Happy to report I did buy less than usual at the store. On a mission for us to use up what we already have here.

Things I did not do:

• Most of the weekly home blessing tasks. No vacuuming, mopping, or sheet changing happened here.
• No dusting or polishing of mirrors and doors either.
• Didn’t really need to purge many catalogs and magazines as I do that out of habit the last week of each month

The only thing on the weekly home blessing task I completed (except just now realizing I forgot the trash down here) was to empty all the trash cans. Kind of an easy one to remember as tomorrow is our trash day. And not on the list, I did so much laundry. Still need to finish up a few loads of that tomorrow as well.

Speaking of trash…

The Monday Mission

I sort of last minute cleaned my kitchen trash can. Didn’t really follow the directions as I didn’t get to it until it was almost dark outside. May go ahead and do a better job of things with it tomorrow if time allows. However, I did wipe it off as it was quite disgusting. It probably needs another coat of paint or to be tossed and replaced with a new metal trashcan. Something to ponder. Anyway, here are the less than exciting (and kind of gross) before and after photos of the trash can.

Tomorrow’s task sounds so much simpler, just a serious wipe down of the counter tops. Speaking of tomorrow, I’ll end this here so I can get upstairs and clean out the kitchen sink.

However, let’s not end this post with trashy photos. Here’s a fall decoration that belonged to my late mother-in-law. I’m pondering where to hang it.

What’s your least favorite room to clean?

So, I’m going to show you some cringe-worthy photos here in a moment.  This portable outdoor charcoal grill was also cringe-worthy in my husband’s opinion. I’m really just sharing the photo to not start with the scary ones.

The story with the grill is that he bought it for me because I don’t care for hamburgers on the smoker. There is just something about a hamburger cooked over charcoal that smokers and gas grills don’t quite achieve. This portable, charcoal grill is what love looks like after 20+ years of marriage. The grill didn’t work very well though the hamburgers were still very good. However, I digress from the topic at hand.

If you’ve been following along, you might recall how I said the Flylady e-mails said this upcoming week was kitchen week. Still so many e-mails. Of course, I’ve not cleaned my e-mail out in a bit. I always plan to do it every week but it doesn’t always happen.

Anyway, I know I share a lot of outside photos of birds and flowers and random nature on here. There is a reason for that. It’s prettier than sharing the inside of my home. So, in an effort of realness….a scary one at that, I’m going to share the pictures I snapped of my kitchen this afternoon just after we had lunch.

Note, some are blurry as the motivation for the perfect photo is hard to find when snapping photos of a messy kitchen.

View from living room looking into the kitchen

(Note this is also after our trip to Sam’s Club and Wal-Mart where we hadn’t put everything away yet) And now, the view from the other side.

The weird half open shade thing is because they always pull one down when playing video games due to reflections from outside.

A Couple of Close Ups

We all know keeping the kitchen table clear is a struggle.

The bottom of the cleaning rack. Ironically, a place I planned to “neatly” store the cleaning supplies. And no, I have no idea why we have 3 fire extinguishers sitting there. Just need to find a place for them as I think I moved them to make room for something else and now I can’t remember what that was.

Shall we turn to the galley? This area is home to our appliances, the sink, and the counter tops.

Galley Kitchen View

Apologies for the blurry photo. The light was giving me fits of frustration.

In Focus Close-Ups

Yes, those biscuits are from this morning. Sometimes dishes get “lost” over there if I’m facing the sink cleaning things. And here’s the sink area, remember please, this was right after lunch. And yes, I did clean up a bit after the photo. However, it is still a bit of a mess.

Hopefully, my cringe worthy photos showed you a real side of things around here and maybe even made you feel better about your home. Here let’s clear our minds of all the mess with a soothing fall photo of a random acorn on the deck table.

My plan for the series this week is to show my kitchen progress as I follow along with the missions for each day. Contingent, of course, upon my work schedule (showing the progress, not doing the missions. I do plan to do them no matter what).

For now, I’m off to clean out my kitchen sink for the night.

NOTE: This post is part of my 31 Days series, FlyBaby Reborn. Making a landing page for all the posts is on the list for this week. Meanwhile, for more information, find my first post in the series here.

It’s 11 PM on Saturday night and way past my bedtime. Instead I’m posting here after spending about 30 minutes working on this:

A graphic designer, I am not. However, at least I have a button/photo for this series. Didn’t want to bore you with sink photos every night.

And yes, I did clean out the sink tonight. I wanted to skip it but weather cut our band competition time short (the band got in their performance but opted to come home rather than stay for the awards portion). So, I had no excuse. Even threw in a load of laundry.

Had a chuckle reading through a few of the many (had forgot how many e-mails!) Flylady e-mails as next week is apparently kitchen week. And one of the tasks involved the pantry. Said don’t take everything out to re-organize it. Funny because earlier today I half-emptied the pantry thinking I’d do just that.

We’ll see what happens during the course of the new week. For tonight, I’m keeping this way past my bedtime post short and ending it here.

I started my 31 days of doing the shiny sink thing a night early. In case you missed it, I’m doing a 31 days series titled FlyBaby Reborn. Started it yesterday (so a day early!).

So on September 30th before I went to bed, I shined my sink. True I didn’t go all in with the scrubbing. Mainly I just emptied it of dishes and cleaned it before going to bed.

Morning

Now, remember that I have a college aged son and a teenager living here. This is what I woke up to this morning.

Ugh. However, I chose to leave it. Made the bed. I don’t know maybe an unmade bed bothers me more.

And Tonight

It was a hectic first Friday of the month around here. Worked all day, afterward delivered a trash bag order to a friend and that turned into nice dinner out. We actually started with plans to get coffee but alas no indoor Starbucks at the location we picked so I don’t know…coffee morphed into a margarita. And dinner. And coming home to this?!

I didn’t even fix/eat dinner here tonight. Must say I am thankful they found something considering we didn’t have much. How exactly do deli chicken (we’ve been keeping some in the freezer) and rice make this kind of mess?

One margarita is not enough to answer that question. However, staying true to the Flylady form…I said nothing and simply cleaned up the mess. Realizing I forgot to push the button on the dishwasher last night. Oops. Loaded a few more dishes in there. And then, glad to have this stuff.

Just picked it up yesterday. I do have a long term plan for my late night snack fiends to find this and clean those dishes! And so, here is tonight’s “shiny sink” though again it’s mostly just clean not the full on shiny yet. 

And to start things off right and “official” tonight, I signed up for the Flylady e-mails (again).

Do you follow the Flylady sytem, does it work for you?

So, I’ve decided to try a new 31 days series with a bit of a different topic, FlyBaby Reborn. What? Yes, I’m going to give the Flylady thing one more try and actually be serious about it for 31 days.

By being serious about it, I mean I’m going to blog about it as part of a write 31 days series. Note, write 31 days is no longer an official thing, sadly. However, I did find a Blog 31 Days website and plan to join in with it.

One thing I plan to do differently is post my blog entries at the end of the day. This series is going to be mostly just a tool to keep me (and maybe you, too?) motivated to continue with this method of keeping order in my house.

Why?

Honestly, because my house is a disaster at the moment. I’m feeling overwhelmed by it.  The FLY part of all this stands for finally loving yourself and I do think it’s time for that.

I’ve had small amounts of success in the past with following the Flylady system half-heartedly. So I’ve decided to go all in for the month of October and just see what happens.

Not sure why I’m calling this series FlyBaby reborn either. Just sounded more interesting to me than back on the Flylady bandwagon.

The Shiny Sink

The whole premise of Flylady always starts with shining the kitchen sink. So, my main posts each night will focus on the shiny sink. Sometimes the posts might be no more than a photo of the sink. Other times I’ll share a bit more about how things are progressing.

That’s it for now. Fancy blog button and official landing page to follow. For now, I’m off to pick a kid up from band practice, finish up some laundry, make a lunch, and of course, shine the kitchen sink!