Sunday, November 27, 2011

Today's fortune: November 27, 2011

Today's fortune: You should be able to undertake and complete anything.

After spending the entire day at my parents' house on Friday after Thanksgiving and spending most of the day Saturday being a lazy bum, I decided it was necessary to do something about the residual mess in our house left over from Thanksgiving on Thursday.

That's right. Our Thanksgiving mess was untouched the entire weekend until today. Gross, I know.

And in the spirit of today's fortune, I decided to undertake and complete something. I knew I didn't have the time, energy or interest to clean the entire house from top to bottom, but I made a vow that every single dish in our house would be clean.

That may not sound like a big deal, but for us it is. Usually we wait until we're using tupperware lids as plates before we do dishes. And we use our dishwasher as a cabinet, too: once a clean load of dishes is complete, we don't waste time putting them away, we just store them in there until we need them.

But I wanted to make sure all the dishes were clean and properly put away today. So this morning while Jamie was doing homework, I started the task. Of course, the first thing I had to do was empty the dishwasher of the few clean dishes left over from the last load. Then I crammed it full of dirties and ran it, but that still left a sink-full of dishes that wouldn't fit. I could have waited and ran a second load, but I didn't think that was sticking to the spirit of the fortune, so I hand-washed those suckers, including a bunch of wine glasses, silverware that I didn't find until after I started the dishwasher, and the big hulking roasting pan, which cradled our Thanksgiving turkey. That particular item required quite a bit of soaking and scrubbing, but it's clean now and stowed away under the counter until we need it again - which will probably Christmas, Easter or next Thanksgiving.

Now there is one dirty saucer and one dirty fork sitting in the sink from Jamie's afternoon study snack (a piece of leftover pie), and I'm going to go wash those right now.

Of course, having all the dishes clean will end in a couple hours when Jamie and I have dinner - leftover stuffing, mashed potatoes and veggies for Jamie, and all that plus turkey covered in a new barbecue sauce that was a gift from my brother for me - but at least for a brief time today, I undertook a task and completed it. That's a good feeling, even when it's something small like a stack of dirty dishes.

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