Cleaning

Mark and I lived in a small one bedroom apartment in Ballston for the first three years we were married. On weekends, it would take me ALL DAY to clean our one bathroom, the bedroom, the kitchen and neaten up the living room (which also doubled as the dining room and our workout space). I think the square footage was less than 800 square feet. I have no idea why in the world it would take me all day to clean that tiny place. Probably because I am easily distracted and, like when I was a kid and told to clean my room, I'd take all sorts of detours when I'd come across something of interest (oh look, a photo album I haven't thumbed through in ages, hmmm this book looks good, I'll read a few pages, etc). Now that we live in a place that's MUCH bigger, I've needed to become more efficient in my cleaning. We have three times as many bathrooms, twice as many bedrooms, a living room that's separate from the dining area, and a family/workout/tv room in the basement. We have two sets of stairs that need to be vacuumed. An entire floor that needs to be mopped. And two floors that need to be vacuumed. And lots of things that need to be dusted. And a kitchen with more counter space that needs to be wiped down.

Today, I'm proud to say, I've been really efficient - bathrooms have been cleaned, two floors of stuff have been dusted, the kitchen is sparkling, and I'm about to vacuum up the giant animal fur tumbleweeds that have been rolling around for the past week (ick). And this has all been done in about 3 hours AFTER I ran 20 miles this morning.

I've downloaded alot of fun music over the past week in anticipation of our trip to Ireland - Gaelic Storm, plus a couple other Irish songs by random artists. I can almost taste the Guinness. I've also put the new Avril Lavigne song on my iPod - all have been very helpful in making this day of cleaning more enjoyable.