I am a compulsive list maker. If I leave the house on any given day without my printed schedule and task list I feel naked. Unfortunately, life often has other plans and pays absolutely no attention to my insignificant priorities, imposing its own to-do list instead. No matter what you do, things usually get started all by themselves, plan or no plan. Therein lies the answer to how entire days sometimes fly bye, leaving even the best intentions unaccomplished.

Take last Sunday morning, for example. In my house I am the designated early riser, having been born with a seemingly unchangeable body clock that turns my brain on somewhere between 5:00 and 5:30 AM (if I’m lucky). Once that happens there’s no choice but to get up. It is impossible to shut down the brain, which has already starting to work on the day’s list of tasks that will in any event be preempted by external forces. So, I hauled myself out of the sack at roughly 5:20 AM. Like most folks I have a morning routine. As the first one up it falls on me to make the coffee. Most days I set it up the night before, but, I had fallen into a deep slumber in the recliner while watching TV the previous night and it was all I could do to get my semi-comatose self upstairs to bed. The coffee was postponed to the morning.

So, there I am, half awake in a dark and silent kitchen, counting the scoops of coffee. In the process I happened to glance over at the cats’ food bowl, which was empty. So, after starting the coffee maker I opened the cabinet and pulled out the large Tupperware container in which we keep the cat food. While filling the cats’ bowl I then noticed that the Tupperware container was itself nearly empty, so then I had to go to the pantry, where we keep the humongous bag of cat food from which we periodically re-fill the Tupperware thingy.

While rummaging through the pantry I realized what a disorganized mess the bottom of it was. Paper sacks for bagging old newspapers for re-cycling, the cat food, some equipment for grilling, etc., were all strewn around haphazardly. This compelled me, after filling the Tupperware cat food container, to pull everything out in order to re-organize the pantry. But wait! Once everything was out and piled on the kitchen table, it was obvious I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to wash the pantry floor!

The next step, then, was to look under the kitchen sink for the cleaner. Lily, one of our cats, looked up quizzically from her morning meal as I poked around the cabinet under the kitchen sink for the cleaner. Unfortunately, looking for the cleaner for the pantry floor made me realize the cabinet under the sink was still in disarray from some plumbing work we’d had done the previous week. Thus, my next project became obvious. Naturally, while organizing the cabinet, I happened upon the replacement sponge that my wife had purchased the previous day for the dish wand, so I decided it was time to replace the old sponge. Of course, while replacing the sponge I had to refill the wand with dish detergent, and as long as I was standing there with the new sponge and the freshly filled wand, I had to wash the handful of dishes left over from the previous night that could not go into the dishwasher. Having finished washing the dishes, I HAD to dry them, didn’t I? And while I was at it, I figured I might as well put away the clean dishes from the dishwasher.

All of these spiraling mini projects generated stuff to be thrown away. I gathered it all and put it in the garbage, which I noticed needed to be taken out. When I got to the garage with the bag of kitchen garbage, that garbage can was full, so I had to change THAT bag. Luckily, the garage had been the focus of a similar chain of projects the previous day, so I didn’t spot anything there to divert me further.

Eventually, the kitchen was put back together and the house returned to its morning silence. I was finally able to enjoy a cup of coffee as the first rays of daylight started to seep through the windows. It was just another day on which, like so many others, I was starting out behind schedule.

Bob Dohn
www.BobDohn.com
Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage
140-A South Roselle Road, Schaumburg, IL 60193
Direct Phone: 847-301-3126