Dog tired and unmotivated

I got a rotten night’s sleep last night, the second such in a row, and it was a commute morning (4:30 a.m. alarm) and I’ve got an extra child staying with us right now (I’m going to start calling him Captain Chatter – same kid from last year, and he has not outgrown his chattering) (whoooooo boy) (he talked for FORTY FIVE STRAIGHT MINUTES this morning while we did the school run [walk]).

By the time I got home, I was so tired I about wanted to go back to bed. But of course, I’ve got not one, not two, but three children in the Den right now. Two of them chatterboxes, one of them pissy.

I don’t know what his deal is right now, but Captain Adventure is Mr. Pissy lately. It may be because he has started refusing to take a nap, but really still kind of needs one. So about noon, he turns into this snarling ball of pissiness, and may $DEITY Have Mercy On Your Soul if you try to put him down for a nap.

Sounds like you’ve got a caged mountain lion upstairs. Seriously. I’ve let him go for over half an hour hoping he’ll give up and go to sleep, but he never did. Just kept ratcheting up the racket until, afraid he was going to actually cause his crib to shatter, I gave up and got him.

Little jerk.

Anyway, as with every other day of my life, I have a list of stuff I want to get done. A toy purge in the kids’ bedrooms. A dresser purge, too. And a long list of baking. And I got my kitchen thoroughly cleaned yesterday except for one small stretch of counter space.

You know, the one completely covered from the floor to the bottoms of the cupboards with paper, backpacks, bits of unwanted cookies, Capri Sun wrappers (mostly empty), odd bits of plastic and string and $DEITY only know what-all else?

Yeah, that’s the one I didn’t finish yesterday. Or start, either.

Mostly because my fridge was the stuff of nightmares, so I ended up taking every last thing out of it including the shelves, scrubbing the interior like I thought I had good sense, putting everything back minus a few (dozen) bottles of stuff that had been in there since approximately 1998, when we moved in.

OK, nothing that old.

But I did find a few nasty things, like some celery that had morphed into a liquid state and some cottage cheese with an expiration date of, I kid you not, April 2006.

Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

By the time I finished that, I was exhausted and also the news was on. So I gladly plonked my butt on the sofa and responded to all demands with a well-informed, even scholarly, expression and a tart, “Excuse me, but you may have noticed that the BBC World News is on?”

And then I watched How Clean Is Your House, which is still my favorite form of voyeurism. I felt extremely smug and superior because my fridge? Flawless. Kim would not have been shrieking in horror and proclaiming that she was going to be sick, NO! REALLY! (She always says that. But she never is. Heh.)

My bathrooms were also clean, because I had motivated myself early in the morning to do them.

We shall, however, give the state of that One Counter and the utter devastation in the kids’ rooms a glossing over, OK? Likewise, we will not suppose what their reaction would have been if they had turned up in the morning before I had done that cleaning.

Today, I’ve made two loaves of bread, one loaf of banana bread and started to make cookies when I realized that I didn’t have enough flour in the ‘inside’ Tupperware. OK, so I’ll go get the main flour canister and refill it, oh wait. That’s right. It’s empty too. I washed it two days ago. Hmm. OK. So, it’s New Bag Of Flour Time.

Ugh.

Cracking open a 50# sack of flour is not like opening a 5# one. The 5# version you just open, dump into your counter canister and there you are. Done. Throw the wrapper in the recycling and all is happy.

The 50# sack, however…well first of all, you’ve got to get it into the house. While I’d rather use a team of horses and a crane, I’m stuck with human muscle. And since it is a commute day and there is no Manly Type around, I’m stuck with my human muscle, which is…uh…well, let’s just say it ain’t what it used to was.

But it is what it is so I got out there and wrestled the bag into the house. Then I went out for Bins 1 and 2. Bin 2 was sitting there all nice and clean and dry and empty.

Bin 1, however, was full of rice. Which I had put in there after receiving a huge sack of rice at a sharp discount some time ago. We do go through rice at a fairly good flip, but Bin 1 is going to be mostly full of rice for some time to come.

@*^&@.

There then began a comedy worthy of a sitcom as I went through the Den in search of large capacity bins that were clean and had a good, tight seal. I got so desperate that I was eyeballing the level of the cocoa powder in Bin 3 (no good, more than half full) (hmm…so, how many brownies would I have to make to empty that sucker…?) and asking myself just how nasty it would be, really, to dump toys out of this bin and just fill it up with flour? (Because you can’t wash a bin and then put flour into it, even if you towel dry it – it’s got to be bone dry, or your flour will get all ucky.)

Eventually, I found enough clean, dry bins (no, I didn’t use anything that had previously held toys) (or leaves) (or bugs) and began ladling the flour from the bag into the various containers.

By the time I’d finished, I was sick to death of the whole thing.

And then I remembered: the cookies.

You know…cookies really are rather overrated, aren’t they?

This is the part where you just nod politely and say, “Oh yes, they surely are.” We all know they aren’t. But you are all going to be good friends and agree with this blatant lie for my emotional welfare, because I really don’t feel like whumping up a batch of cookies right now. I feel like sitting on my butt doing nothing until it is time to go get Eldest and Danger Mouse from school. For which, I am taking Homer. All praise be to the internal combustion engine and automatic sliding doors, hallelujah, amen.