Did I say Monday? Let it never be said that I am not an optimist.

Hi! Hello! Remember me? I'm the girl with the (still sorta) messy house who was going to clean for a weekend, and then come right back with funny stories - remember? Huh? Hello?

It's been a week, and I'm still cleaning my house. I'll bet you jokers had a pool going to see if I my decaying carcass was going to be discovered under a mountain of laundry, or if I had just thrown in the dust rag, cleared out our bank account and headed for the border.

It's been all twilight zone around here, as I've been facing up to the fact that I'm a little (just wee, tiny, baby, HAH!) addicted to the online world, to the detriment of the namesakes of this blog. In a show of bravado, I turned off the computer and left it off for a week, except for a brief email check each day.

And, well... things are both better and worse around here. The house is getting tidy, and the kids are delighted with my attentiveness. I've still got a long way to go, though, and right now, sitting here at the keyboard, I'm so happy I could lick the monitor.

For all my life, I've been a sweeper-under-the-rug person. Rather than take the three extra steps to get the dustpan and put the broken whatever in the trash, I just lift up a corner and use my foot to shove the offending shards underneath. After a while, the rug gets a little crunchy to walk on, so you walk around it, and then you spill some coffee on it, and pile some toys on it, and eventually you start feeling like a new rug is just the thing. So you start to roll up the old one, and you notice the stains, and the wear, and the shards of crap you kicked under it.

As I work, instead of feeling pride and accomplishment, I've spent a lot of time this week noticing the stains, scowling at the damage, and cutting myself on shards of things long hidden under the rug. It has been a tiring, dirty and discouraging excavation, and I'm tempted to waste time devising hiding places for all the flawed, broken crap that I haven't had time to fix. Perhaps one of those deep pile carpets would work...

But no. No more illusions. No more rugs. It's time to get out the dust pan and be done with it. I'm airing this joint out.