From Chaos to cluttered to clean

It's been a month (well, 4 weeks to be exact) since Jordan & I started on our daily cleaning household chores list and while my excitement over actually doing each task is waning, my exuberance over the finished product is still going strong.

In other words: I still hate doing laundry, but I adore having clean clothes all the time. No more living out of laundry baskets, wearing the least wrinkled item, digging around for that one blasted cream-colored cami that will only go with my cream lace top, but where can it be, I've looked in every possible corner of 2 overflowing baskets, 2 drawers, and through the dirty pile of clothes on the floor. {deep breath}

It's been good.

As it turns out, I don't even need to straighten for an allotted 15 minutes each day. Chances are good that I put things away when I'm finished, which leaves very little to pick up, so it happens throughout the day instead of in a 15 minute block. The timer approach was great in the first week to get things rolling, but shortly, I was finding myself organizing jewelry and lining up my shoes for 15 minutes because everything was already in its place. Interestingly enough, my clean-it-up-ness might be spilling over into work as well. On Saturday, I spent 15 minutes of my morning throwing away paper, shelving charts, returning angiocaths and saline flushes to their rightful place and wiping down counters.

I'm having a harder time with the meal prep part of our weekly chores. A month into things and I am having just as much of a writer's block with nightly dinners as I am here on the blog. I'd like to see where we are financially after finishing this month of eating at home almost every meal and only buying the groceries we actually need. Well and a few bags of skittles.

In the last month, I've also gotten back out to the pavement once again and I'm starting to feel like I'm getting my running groove back. It only took 9 months, but at least I'm putting some miles on my sneakers again. I'm looking forward to cooler days on the horizon to really increase mileage and speed without feeling like I'm having a heatstroke. Increasing my mileage will be a big deal soon.... because it looks like I'm doing another half marathon.

Yeah, you read that right.

By the end of the month, I'll be scratching the surface of a training plan that will hopefully prepare me for the Dallas Half Marathon on December 8. More details to come.

Call me crazy.