Just barely, but I hit the 10% goal. Of course, not without some missteps along the way – hit a wall around 4:30 (too much lunch? not enough? too hot? who knows.) Then I had dinner right after work (I was not in control of the timing there) which resulted in a bit of a food coma on top of the earlier wall-hitting…
But, I laid down for a half hour, let myself snooze a bit, and then set the timer and did it.
There is a dent in the living room.
A small dent, but a visible one.
Go me.
I had a great weekend. But, now it’s the work week, and invariably I am knackered when I clock out. It’s very frustrating, because I don’t have a physically taxing job – I just sit quietly and think all day. I shouldn’t need a nap after that, and yet…
I don’t know what the trick is going to be yet. Timer? Sheer willpower? Electric shock mechanism in the couch?
Whatever it is, the living room is in my sights today. And lord, it needs it.
Let’s do this.
Made my 10% of free time goal both days, kitchen is ~1/3 to 1/2 done, the powder room is sparkling, and a load of towels is now very clean, folded, and put away.
Things that helped:
– Breaking things into small tasks. Not “clean kitchen”, but work on counter between fridge & sink – and start with just getting trash off, then move stuff, then scrub counter, etc. Not “clean powder room”, but clean the sink. One small task at a time works better for me.
– Timer & stopwatch. 15 minutes between tasks. (Which is just the right amount of time to let the cleaning spray sit.) Time how long the task, or portion of a task takes and write it down. It didn’t *feel* like I worked for just shy of 4 hours this weekend. But I did! And if I **maintain** and do the things I did yesterday and today on the schedule I set out in Tody – it will go so much faster every time.
– Having something utterly mindless on TV that I am not invested in, but is good background noise. This weekend has been the 80s hit, “Reilly, Ace of Spies” – my goodness, Sam Neill is a baby in this, and plays such a cad! (I suspect my mother taped this on our VCR back in the day.)
– 10% of free time goal. It doesn’t seem like much, but it adds up – it’s 1-2 hours/day on a weekend, 30-60 minutes during the week. Doable when I do it a bit at a time, and I am seeing results, which is so critical for me to believe I’m actually getting anything done. It was also very good today when I started running a bit out of steam to see I was super close to the goal.
– Stopping. When I hit my goal of 10% of my free time doing housework, I’ve pretty much stopped, unless I was smack in the middle of something, or felt a genuine burst of energy.
Things that have not helped:
– Using a distressing amount of paper towels and cleaning spray, neither of which is the easiest thing to find these days. Myers lemon tub & tile is very good, though. (It was bought in desperation a while back when there was nothing else available.)
This is a nice sight on my phone:
I love them. LOVE THEM. But it’s weird that they don’t actually make the work happen, LOL.
But, there are two that I really like, Habitica, which makes it a game, and Tody, which is crazy flexible.
Habitica is great for creating habits, but I think Tody is better for specific household cleaning management. It has a *ton* of preset tasks you can put on your to-do lists and 5 levels of “cleaning attitude” to determine how often you do X task (and you can still edit that on top of it.)
And if you go Premium on Tody, there are extra task options, and you can share it between users, so you can spread the cleaning love. And it’s only $4.99 a *year* – very worth it.
That being said… Oh my god, I am bad at the lists. My problem is that I look at the empty app, add every last damn thing I need to do and suddenly… I have a list with 100 items on it and I get overwhelmed and get nowhere.
So, I am trying AGAIN – but this time, I’m just adding things as I do them. Yesterday, I added the things from the kitchen I did, with a 10 day repeat. Today, so far I’ve just added the powder room sink and mirror as I’ve done them.
So, maybe this time, if I don’t add 100 things in a day – maybe I will not get overwhelmed. We shall see!
4PM and I hit the 10% of free time to housework goal. Slightly off track in that I ended up only mucking about in the kitchen, but hey, it’s progress!
Got that one stupid spot in the kitchen that’s been on my to-do list for weeks. Counter cleared and scrubbed. Sink emptied and scrubbed. Dishwasher run. Handwash required items done and put away. Stove scrubbed. Trash taken out.
May try to do a bit more, but also allowing myself to call it a day if needed.
The one annoying spot before:
The after! (The soap looks really odd because it’s coffee scented and has grounds in it as an exfoliant.)
Cause I like charts. 🙂
On the whole, things are going in the right direction. Except non-work time management. That is definitely a problem. I look around the house and there’s not any one thing that needs to be done – it’s EVERYTHING that needs to be done and then I get overwhelmed and basically shut down and that’s just not good AT ALL.
But, in the free time I have between now and leaving town, if I spent 25% of that time – a whole 15 minutes per hour, that would end up being over 2 hours per room/area I want to hit before leaving, and that’s not nothing. Hell, even 10% would be an hour in each spot – again, not nothing.
That being said, I’m going to try and hit every area once today and just get a bit done. Not the whole room, just **something**. I know from experience, once I get on a roll, it gets easier, but I have to get rolling first.
So, off to the kitchen and hopefully that time chart will look better by the end of the day.
Net Worth:
Time to Move/Retire:
What I can spend:
Debt Levels:
Where my time has gone… TL;DR – no clue:
The next three months are going to SUCK financially.
Any “not shopping because of a pandemic” savings went fully out the window with the pandemic pay cut I had to take, which not only wiped out the small decrease in expenses, but any actual savings to boot.
And income tax is due next month, and property tax in August. The next time I’ll be able to put money **to** savings is September. Please lord, don’t let there be an emergency. I’m seriously considering suspending my 401K contribution until our pay is restored, which should be the end of September.
I’m just kinda fucked for cashflow and I have savings, but I am so wishing my car hadn’t crapped out to the tune of 5K in January.
I can’t even really think about moving or retirement right now – the big focus will be trying not to hemorrhage cash for the next 3 months. And getting the house clean.
Oh FML, got paid yesterday, paid a fuckton of bills, and woke up this morning to “an overdraft posted” message because somehow I paid one credit card and didn’t get it in Quicken and had my balance wrong. It’s not the end of the world, the overdraft doesn’t have any fees, the interest is low, and I can move things to cover it, but FFS.
This weekend I need to sit down and seriously evaluate EVERYTHING.
But Wave Chasing is back, mapped to the domain, and I’m not going to muck around with trying to get old posts back in, they’re over 9 years old and absolutely obsolete.
But, the goals remain the same. Move to beach, retire.
It was going to be a stretch 9 years ago, coming off a massive recession and family illness sending me far into the red. In that time I’ve also gone to grad school, had 6 figures worth of dental expenses (yay, America), gotten a job, entered a pandemic, taken a pay cut for the pandemic, and now I’m preparing for another massive fucking recession while watching society reach its breaking point.
Early retirement is pretty much out of the question anymore. And I’m not even sure capitalism is going to survive this – and I’m kinda dependent on it, despite the utter garbage it’s turned out to be. 😦
My mental health is kinda shit and I probably need therapy, but I can’t afford it financially, or having it somehow end up on my permanent health record as a pre-existing condition. (Again, yay America.)
Right now, my time to retirement is between 14.5 and 21 years, depending on if and when I try to move.
My house is a fucking disaster to boot (see: mental health) – and yesterday I just hit my breaking point, which rarely happens. Of all things, because I couldn’t find a jar of popcorn in the kitchen. (I still don’t know where the fuck it is. It’s entirely possible that I finished it and it’s just not there, but I am sure the moment I get another jar, it will magically appear.)
But it just resulted in a GODDAMMIT I NEED TO FIX ALL THIS SHIT moment. Moving and/or retirement won’t happen soon, but I need to work at it and if nothing else, make this a non-disaster place to live between now and whenever.
So, I decided to re-up the blog and try to hold myself accountable that way. The challenge is when I hit these “gotta do something” points, I do too much and just wear myself the fuck out, or I look around and I’m so overwhelmed that I just basically curl up in a corner and stop functioning.
So, gonna try and take it by tiny steps and we’ll see.
I will be hosting WaveChasing.net at WordPress.com – I just have to figure out how to get all the old posts imported here, then get it mapped back to WaveChasing.net.
In theory, it should be fairly transparent to the reader. The theme will be different, but other than that you shouldn’t see much different, except no ads.
Why?
Cheaper. $12 a year to map wavechasing.wordpress.com to wavechasing.net vs. $60 a year to host it.
No worries on having to constantly upgrade my WordPress software, and no having to download a ton of plug-ins – the WP.com blogs have more than enough features built in.
It won’t happen overnight, but if you’re reading this at wordpress.com, I thought you might want to see what’s in the works.
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Wave Chasing 