Clean?

I have a confession to make.  I am not a very good housekeeper. 

I would like to be a good housekeeper and I continue to make resolutions to myself to do better, but somehow, I just never seem to get around to it. 

Now, I'm not talking about clutter.  Clutter happens in a busy life whether you like it or not.  I can deal with clutter -- you just move the stuff from one place to another (preferably another room) and voila, the clutter is gone!  (Yesterday I actually found a book that Mom lent me that had been missing since July.  All it took was moving some clutter from one place to another!)

When I say I am not a good housekeeper, I mean real dirt and dust.  It may not surprise many of the readers of this blog that I do not like to dust.  It is a time consuming chore that seems to be never-ending and then needs to be done again just days later.  However, I do sometimes wish that someone else would do some dusting around here . . . it is really getting bad. 

As a matter of fact, it was getting so bad in the kitchen that I was not sure if the stuff on my cabinet doors was dust or something worse.  I actually took bleach water to all the cabinet doors and the buffet today.  I also (for the first time since I moved in) cleaned my oven today.  This was prompted by all the time in the last couple of weeks that I have set the smoke alarms off when the gunk on the bottom of the oven started to burn.  -- Yeah, not a very good housekeeper.

But the good news is that I now have one room done and my kitchen smells like bleach and lemon scented oven cleaner! 

Just so you know, I do not blog about this to "brag" about my poor housekeeping, but rather to make a resolution in writing that I am going to do better.  ----    (Right after I finish this book that I just found.)

At the thrift store . . .

Most of you know that I am not really a thrift store shopper . . . at least not for clothes.  I trace this to my childhood where I wore hand-me-downs most of the time. I believe that some of the clothes I had probably had at least two (possibly four) previous owners.  Sometimes it seemed that the clothes I wore in high school were about ten years out of date.  I remember seeing a picture taken in the '70s of Aunt Ginny wearing a shorts outfit - the top of which I wore to school in the early '80s.  I don't mean to complain, just to explain why I prefer to buy my own clothes and not to wear something that someone else had first.  I usually buy from the clearance rack, so I am sill not wearing the latest style.  But now I am usually only one season out of date and not a full decade.

However . . . since I started doing MyFitnessPal back in December, I have been losing weight.  Not fast, but pretty steadily.  Even buying off the clearance racks, it does not make financial sense to go out and buy new clothes every few months as I slowly drop sizes.  So, at least until I reach my goal, I have been shopping at the local thrift store - particularly for pants.  I really have to be in the mood to shop for clothes in the first place (or really need them), because I really dislike trying things on in that cramped little cubical with poor lighting and other peoples' discarded try-ons cluttering up what little space there is.  It is even worse (I think) at the thrift store because of the whole scavenger hunt to find something-I-think-I-might-like-to-try-on-that-is-actually-in-a-size-that-might-fit that precedes stepping into the cramped little cubical. 

Despite all of that, I went to my local thrift store today.  I count myself the winner of the scavenger hunt.  I spent $22.92 - $2.92 more than what I had budgeted myself.  I got a pair of jeans, two pairs of dress pants, two skirts and three tops.  Not bad considering it is far from my favorite place to shop.