Happiness for a Lazy Procrastinator

It's no accident that, years ago, my first blog was called Kim Procrastinates.  Somewhere along the way I had totaled up the numbers and found that if I had spent that time on my dissertation rather than my blog I would have finished years earlier.

I am a procrastinator,* and I am a bit on the lazy side.  I'll own that, fully.  I'd rather fiddle around on the Internet, for the most part, than do anything other than perhaps read.  I am also so NOT a neat freak, preferring to spend time doing anything other than cleaning up things.  Short of world peace, the one thing I would wish for should a Genii pop out of a lamp in front of me would be a non-defective Robot Maid to keep my house clean and laundry done.  Seriously. 

So this past week of cleaning up rental properties and running around like a crazy woman to Lowe's to pick up supplies (all but our annoying fake snow day when I was home with kiddos all day) has been a surprise to me. I know I like painting rent houses & remodeling; that I've figured out already.  But cleaning them is something I've always hired someone else to do in the past.  (I mean, since I've been able to do so.)

I've been having fun! Yes, the three baseball player college students who lived in our one rent house really really had a filthy refrigerator that stank when it was turned off and had this brown teriyaki sauce goo EVERYwhere.  But cleaning up after these folks & the other place (that wasn't actually as bad, to be honest) has brought out my inner Monk.  A little bit, at least.  I now have a real preference for a cleaning product (a couple of them) because of how much better they worked than other things I've used before.  (I like 409 and those Lysol wipes & this orange cleaning stuff.)

There's a certain satisfaction in just looking around and knowing that a few hours ago the place was trashed and now it's gleaming, and the fridge looks like new and you did that.  Now, heaven help the tenants who trash the place I spent so much time and effort cleaning.  They're going to be SO busted. 

Andrew has been joking that he has the "most educated cleaning lady on the planet."  Now, it's entirely possible that there are other PhDs who are doing professional cleaning, for whatever reason.  It's a tough job market out there.  I am kind of overeducated for the position, and yet, I do NOT mind it.  The whole point of this rental property landlord business is so that we can make enough moolah to retire early and live on a yacht in the Med.  Seriously.  Daytrips for the kids to the Louvre for art history class.  Etc.  And thus, it really does NOT suck to be working on this.  It takes up a LOT of time, and sometimes it's darn hard, but it's worth it.

But I'm really fine to not be worrying right now about making syllabuses and getting ready for another semester.  Next week's plan is to post my killer issue of Women Writers and work towards making it into a nonprofit organization, and possibly  squeeze in some more on my novel.  This last week of manual labor has been kind of cool, and I'm channelling my inner cleaning lady on my own house a bit, too. 

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*surprisingly, I didn't even have procrastination as a tag until now!  Funny!

**and, by the way, what the heck happened to blogger's spellchecker?  ANNOYing.