A Manic Friday

It wasn't a Monday, It was my husband's fault. It was a chain of events. No time to eat. It was a manic Friday.

I should know the signs by now. It starts with a simple, inocuous task, It mushrooms; the day is chaotic.

Last week, my husband went on a short business trip for a meeting - held in a casino hotel. That was the start of it all. He won $2000 while waiting to go to the airport to come home.

Sometimes the distinction between need and want generates a frenzy. We needed a new stove because the coils on the old one would not sit level, no matter what we did. And when any burner was on high, the whole top of the stove became so hot that getting burned was a real possibility.

On the other hand, the fridge works just fine, no matter that the plastic in one place on the outside is cracked (and the damn thing was expensive to boot) and that we could use more space. But it keeps the food at exactly the right temperature, and really everything fits if we organize it. A new fridge is a want, not a need.

That distinction led to some new handbags, a scarf, and some awesome dress pants, a cleaning, sorting, re-arranging frenzy, and a cull of all the receipts and instruction manuals for everything purchased since about 1995. Oh, and some work on the arrangement of pots and pans and a couple of drawers of seldom-used cooking utensils. As I said, a manic Friday.

I'm not sure if it's my nature to start a task in the spare room and end up several hours later re-decorating the family room and re-stacking the firewood, or if all events in a house are only small threads that we pull, engendering the entire alteration of all storage and living arrangements in said house. It's not procrastination either; no starting something to avoid another something. No, it means finishing it all, often in one day.

So how did I get from saying yes to a stove, no to a fridge, yes to some new apparel and accessories and several hours of work?

The stove was almost a given; win $2000, buy that stove - delivery on Friday; be sorely tempted in appliance store to add a new fridge to the order; talk self out of new fridge.

Feel deprived; shop next day for a new scarf; buy three handbags, a scarf, and some trousers; feel elated. Go home to find that three new handbags will not fit into current space for handbags.

There's the thread. In order to make space for new handbags, I began to sort through a chest of drawers and a closet, which of course grew immediately to a huge undertaking.

Unfortunately, this was on the same day as the delivery of the new stove, which involved some re-arranging in the kitchen, culling some pots that would not work with the ceramic top of the stove, which led to more re-arranging in the kitchen - the 25-year-old espresso maker lived in the pot cupboard and simply had to be removed, which led to a hunt for all the accessories to go with it, which led to cleaning out a drawer with all the old and seldom-used utensils.  Cleaning the floor under the old stove led to some work on the cleaning supplies under the sink and sorting through cleaning rags, of which there were altogether too many.

The bedroom closet/drawer efforts were on hold.

I simply should not have put away the receipt for the new stove in the drawer where I keep all the receipts. I always open that drawer and throw in a new receipt and close the drawer. But not today. Today was the day when one more receipt broke the camel's back, and I spent 30 minutes going through them all, throwing out the 95% which had warranties expired, plus all the instruction manuals for stuff we no longer own!

Somewhere along the way, I managed to shop for a few groceries, go to the bank, try a cooking experiment, cook dinner, and spend 40 minutes on the treadmill. Oh, and pick up and deliver my husband to the car dealership to have his snow tires put on.

The handbags got put on hold, and I am pooped. I don't usually have these manic kinds of days - probably, I'm more often procrastinating, which leads to chaos when one card gets pulled from the house of cards that is life in most households.

Tomorrow, I am going to sleep in.  I will probably ignore the handbags, or risk starting the whole organizing frenzy again. Phew!!!