Procrastination
Housewifery (excuse me, I mean the profession of Domestic Engineering!) is not only a full-time job, it will gobble up every tiny bit of time available. The person of whatever gender who takes up that profession had better be prepared to employ any and all means to salvage a precious few hours if they plan on doing anything else. And I mean ‘any means’ to that end. I offer the following suggestions gleaned from 46 years on the job training!
- A notice from the bank that they’ve had to transfer money from savings to checking to cover a draft may indicate that it’s time to balance your bank statement. But that’s why you signed up for the service, so the bank could handle those little annoyances.
- Pile freshly laundered folded towels on the guest bed until there are enough to make it worthwhile to climb up and put them in the linen closet.
Ditto sheets and pillowcases. - A few pieces of lint on the carpet is not a good enough reason to plug in the vacuum cleaner and push it around the floor.
- The windows don’t HAVE to be cleaned until you can’t see through them without rubbing a clear place. Maybe not even then! After all, if you look outside you’ll only see tall grass to be mowed or leaves to rake.
- Movies on VHS are plenty good enough until you feel like tackling the instructions for hooking up the DVD player.
- Last month’s page of the calender has this month in a small box down in the corner. It’s already the middle of the month, might as well wait a couple of weeks and change all the calendars at once.
- There will be more junk mail every day, might as well wait until the weekend to shred it all.
- The winter clothes need to be cleaned before being packed away. By the time that’s done, it will be time to get them out again. Why bother putting them away?
- It won’t hurt the car to go a thousand miles or so longer between oil changes if it’s in good running order. The service tech said so after you handed over that check that the bank had to transfer funds to cover.
Lest anyone reading this take it too seriously, I hasten to add a disclaimer. I certainly am not a compulsive cleaner and tidy-upper of my house. But visitors CAN walk through it, most of the time, without taking their lives in their hands. And I do balance my checkbook every month, well, maybe every couple of months sometimes! AND I get the oil changed in my car regularly.
©2004 Sylvia Nickels
