Downs

• Thursday is the day that I attempt to clean the house. I use to put Calvin in daycare early so I had enough time to get everything done. However, he takes his best morning nap when he is home in his crib so I’ve been avoiding this recently. As a result, I’m now trying to get everything done while he naps. I’ve split the house into two cleaning cycles. I clean the upstairs one week and the downstairs the next week. Every week I clean our tub (it has a non-slide finish which catches dirt horribly) and quickly vacuum the heaviest traffic path downstairs. Since we were gone on vacation, I decided to skip the normal rotation this week and clean all three bathrooms and clean the downstairs floors since these are the areas that get disgusting the quickest (you’d think that since we were gone the house wouldn’t be dirty but somehow it doesn’t work that way). Today I got through cleaning the bathrooms but didn’t get a chance to do the floors before Calvin woke up. After taking him to daycare, I rushed back home and frantically did a quick vacuum of the dirtiest areas of the floor before heading to Carbon Valley to work. I know it seems silly to put a failure to finish cleaning the house as a down. However, enough of my mother rubbed of me to make it difficult for me to relax in a dirty house.

Ups

• Today I went to the Carbon Valley library to work. I’ve been contemplating working at a library for a while now. Sometimes I feel a little claustrophobic staying inside my house all the time. My manager sent out a schedule of where IT staff would float to during the week and I noticed the southern libraries which are nearest me weren’t getting as much staff as some of the other areas (most of IT lives up north). So, I volunteered to visit either Carbon Valley or Erie one day a week. I chose Thursdays because that’s Jaeger’s BLUG night so I am particularly low on human interaction that day. Plus, since he’s not home I don’t have to rush to make dinner. Anyway, it was really nice to be working in the library again. I love being able to work at home due to the flexibility it gives me but it’s nice to be in the library and soak in the book atmosphere sometimes.

Cute Calvin Moment

• This morning I was making Calvin’s breakfast while Jaeger was sitting at the table and Calvin was crawling around on the floor. Calvin loves pulling books off the bookshelf so we have tried to move all the books on the lower shelves into other areas. However, we keep our library books on a shelf that is a little below half-way down the bookshelf. Up to this point, Calvin hadn’t shown any interest in trying to grab these books. Jaeger was watching Calvin stand up next to the bookshelf and mentioned casually that Calvin might show an interest in grabbing the library books soon. At that point, Calvin carefully sat down, crawled over to the shelf that had the library books, stood up and started pulling the library books onto the floor. Jaeger and I were flabbergasted. Obviously Calvin is way too young to know what we were saying but the timing was truly impeccable.

Simplification

• I had a broken light that, for some reason, was taking up space in the cabinet under our bathroom sink. I decided it was finally time to get rid of it so now the cabinet is a little less cluttered. I’m feeling guilty about getting rid of it because I think it was probably fixable. However, I’ve been meaning to fix it for several years now. If I didn’t have time for the last couple of years to deal with it, I certainly don’t now.