The Dirty Little Secret About Laundry

Yes, that pun was intended.

We all do it. You wash the laundry. You dry the laundry. You fold the laundry. You put the laundry in baskets. But many, many times, that is where the laundry stays. In the baskets. It never gets put away.

Apparently, laundry baskets are not meant for storage. The baskets are merely to be used to transport the folded laundry from the laundry room (or wherever you fold) to the room of the owner of the clothes and then the clothes are supposed to be put away.

It’s the putting away that becomes the problem.

Why?

Well, because you can get away with not putting it away. The clothes are clean and if someone needs them, they are right there in the basket.

Time management gurus would tell you not to put off anything that takes less than a few minutes to do.

They are right.

What happens with the laundry? You do a load and then fold it and say “oh, I will wait until the next load is done to put it all away”. And then the next, and the next, and then there is a ton of laundry to put away and it just never seems to get done.

So yes, it would be easier and more time efficient to put away the laundry as it is folded.

But I’m not going to tell you to do that. Do whatever works for you.

I’m no time management guru. I understand that some times, we have to let things slide.

Like this blog. Oops. It has been a while since I posted something. What have I been doing this whole time? Well, not putting away my laundry for one.

I’ve been on holidays a couple of weeks and trying to enjoy as much of the summer as I can. So I let some things slide.

But now I feel like my batteries are recharged and I’m ready to take on the world (ok, not really the world, but you get the idea). I’m actually looking forward to the routine that September will bring, but I’m not quite wishing away the summer yet.

So you can once again look forward to my regular posts each week. If you have any topics you would like me to address, please send me a message and let me know what you are interested in hearing.

Enjoy the rest of your summer and “see” you next week (or sooner!).

What is it that inspires me to get things done?

I do really enjoy writing this blog every week. It gives me a chance to share information and sometimes to be creative and a little more “outside of the box” than I can, say, writing a legal opinion.

It is Monday night as I sit down to write this and I have to say, when I sat down, I thought “I got nothin’.” I was in training all day and I’m feeling a little drained.

So what do I do? It would be really easy for me not to send anything out this week.

But I thought about it, and I have made a commitment to myself that I would write and send this note/blog post EVERY WEEK. Not just when I had something inspiring (or at least something interesting) to say. That meant no getting out of it just because I didn’t feel like it.

‘Cause let’s face it. We are all friends here. There are a lot of things that we all do every day that we don’t like. Things that bore us, tick us off, things that are scary and hard and that would be really easy to not do if we didn’t just do them for whatever reason it is that we have to do them. Some times the reason we do them is out of obligation. Other times it is because we have set goals for ourselves.

And aside from the Nike slogan, what is it that makes us get things done?

Well for me, how I feel about a lot of things I do is explained partly by Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love in her TED talk about nurturing creativity. You can see the whole talk herehttp://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html.

It takes a while for her to get to the point that speaks to me, but stay with it – it is worth the wait.

Elizabeth Gilbert talks about artists and how throughout history the way artists have been treated has changed. At one time, an artist was viewed as having a “genius” that was separate from themselves. If their genius helped them create a work of art, then it was the work of their genius. If their genius didn’t work it’s “magic”, well, that wasn’t entirely the artists fault. This notion of creativity helped prevent artists from becoming too narcissistic and self involved and also kept them from being tormented by the creative process.

Now, an artist’s creativity is viewed as being in them and if their work is great, they are great. If their work is not so great well, …. you get the picture.

The argument is that this change is a mistake. We should still think that one’s genius is outside of us, and that all of us “have” a genius who may or may not decide to show up and help us create something magical and special.

And what does this have to do with a thirty-something lawyer?

Towards the end of her speech, Elizabeth talks about just showing up and doing your job, whatever that may be.

While I’m not a dancer or an artist, the message did move me, and I do feel that way. There are lots of things we don’t want to do, or are afraid to do, or might be hard, but these things are important to us, or to others, or to our success. When you set goals for yourself, it is sometimes hard to get there. But if you do nothing, you will never achieve what you want. You may not reach your goals, depending on how things happen, but you have to try.

So, don’t be afraid, don’t freak out. Just show up. Do your job. Make the effort. Do what it is that you have to do. Push through the hard parts. The worst that will actually happen is not as bad as you think. The best that can happen is that you do something or be a part of something great. But to do nothing, well, then you don’t even have the chance at greatness.

Hope Springs Eternal?

“Hope springs eternal.” I had to look that quote up to see where it came from.

It is from a line in a poem called “An Essay on Man” by Alexander Pope, written in 1733. Thank you Wikipedia.

With the warmer weather and the spring season upon us, there is a lot of hope in the air. The grass is green, the sun is shining and it is time to wake up and take a look around and what is happening.

For those of you who don’t know, I live on a farm. While we have had animals and cash crops in the past, we now rent out some of our land and the rest we use for ourselves. When we were farming, I used to joke that my husband worked to support his farming habit. The truth was not very far off.

So right now, we have seedlings in the window and our potatoes and onions are already in the ground. My husband has plowed a patch of the hay field that we are going to use to grow some sweet corn for the first time. We will soon be getting a cow to raise over the summer (and put in the freezer in the late fall). There is talk of chickens (laying hens and meat birds), but no little chicks have been brought home yet. My daughter carefully selected some packages of seeds to grow sunflowers and other wild flowers.

We have all these plans and hope that our work right now (and throughout the summer) will yield us some fresh vegetables on our plates (and maybe some eggs if we take the plunge and get laying hens). We hope to fill our freezer with beef and chicken and likely some corn as well by late fall. If we are really organized, we hope to have a cold cellar full of canning and preserves so we can enjoy the fruits (um, or vegetables) of our labour for the whole winter. And, if she takes enough interest in it, my daughter hopes to grow the tallest sunflower in Stormont and Glengarry Counties (she’s already asking how long until the Williamstown Fair).

But really, we could end up with an overgrown garden with rotten tomatoes and potato bugs, a cow who jumps the fence, hens and chickens that get eaten by a fox, a fisher (or our own dog – we have the great turkey chick massacre of 2009 as proof of that) and a patch of wilted sunflowers. We don’t know what will happen. But we have hope.

With this change in seasons, what are you hoping for? Is there something you need to do to bring that hope into reality? Do you need to plant some seeds (literally or figuratively)? Do you need to make a change? Whatever it is you are hoping for, figure out what action you need to take make it happen.