Power Hour

Every so often, and I wouldn't call it "frequently", I get a wild organizational bug that takes over me completely. I need to clean everything and go through closets and re-arrange my entire house.

The thing though, is that I am all too aware that this feeling is going to be very fleeting. So I am in some kind of race against the clock that will tell me to just screw it...leave everything where it is.

I'm frantic, I tell you, FRANTIC.

So when I get like this, I need to get everything done RIGHT NOW...or I may never come back to it. Mr. Blogger quite enjoys it when the feeling hits me at about 3:00 in the morning.

Given the fact that I have a friend staying over tonight, then my Mom flying in on Wednesday, I knew that the place needed to be SPOTLESS. I decided to tackle all the crap in the garage (including the ten tons o' memories from the ex). But in finding room for all that, the guest bedroom closet needed to be completely reorganized. Which led me to go through every box in there to find the Christmas stuff. Which led to one pile for trash, one for Goodwill, one to give to friends and one for which to find storage space. Which led to exhaustion.

But I wasn't quitting until it was ALL done.

Apparently someone else had other ideas.

At about 5:00PM, just as it was starting to get dark, the power went out. Boom. Complete blackout. We called the electric company and they said about 500 customers were affected and they were sending technicians to work on it. They also said to expect an approximate ETA of 9:00PM.

EXCUSE ME?!? I have THINGS TO ORGANIZE.

In my frenzied state, I decided to gather every candle in the house and KEEP WORKING. MB went to go get a flashlight and came back with the teeny-tiniest thing I've ever seen.

Note to selves...next purchase... flashlight bigger than thumb.

I had no idea how long I would be dealing with this so I kept at it. Of course, I also accidentally spilled candle wax all over my books, so that slowed me down a bit. But my anal-retentive husband spent hours cleaning those (hey, we each have our idiosyncrasies), so I was covered.

We ordered Italian food and pushed some boxes together to make a table so we could eat on the floor. It was even almost romantic with the candlelight. Or rather, it would have been if I hadn't been freaking out.

Then after a couple hours, power was restored, I shouted in delight, and then saw my handiwork. Not THAT bad considering I hadn't been able to see. OK, that leather jacket probably shouldn't have been in the trash pile, but I fixed that.

I got EVERYTHING done. We still need to actually put out all the Christmas stuff, but for now it's all in a neat pile of boxes in the living room. All I need to do now is buy a tree and decorate everything before my Mom gets here at 11:00AM on Wednesday.

Oh and clean the whole house, wash her sheets and towels and otherwise get everything ready for her white glove test.

I was talking to a friend on the phone last night who told me not to stress so much since surely, "she can't be THAT neat". Or, "I'm SURE there were times when you were growing up that HER home wasn't perfect".

Once the hysterical laughter died down, there was only one thing to say...

"YOU WERE OBVIOUSLY NEVER THERE."