Challenges

 I stopped making new year reso;utions a few years ago.  I always seemed to make the same ones,  lose weight, make money but every year the opposite would happen.  Gain wait and lose money!  So this year I'm doing challenges.  I hope to do a new one every month to six weeks.  I know that once it gets hot all bets are off and any challenges will be out the window.

January's challenge is to keep the living, dinning, kitchen area clean and tidy.  And I'm not doing very well.  The living area is okay, I pick up the flutters in the morning and sweep everyday (or get who ever is hanging around to do it).  Two or three times a week vacuum, run a mop and dust.  So the living area looks good most days!  The dinning area is not good (sigh).  We don't eat on the table there.  This started after Hisao died, I just couldn't face sitting at the table with an empty chair, the table is for six and having just five felt wrong.  So we use the small table in the living area.  So the dinning area has become the dumping area and cats play area.  Also there are cat toilets, they are clean but somehow not nice to eat in the same area.  The reason we have them there is that some of the cats are locked in this area at night, two or three are in the corridor otherwise we come down to fur everywhere and one or two with injuries! They really fight!  So how to keep that space clean and tidy is what I'm pondering.  Thinking of getting rid of the table but it's really big and heavy and I have no idea where to dump it.  It's in a bad state otherwise I would try to sell it.  So need to think about that more.

Then there is the kitchen (very big sigh). I seem to spend ages just washing dishes.  I do a load, leave them to air dry, do so some other chores, some back and there are even more dirty dishes, it's like magic.  I'm really trying to get things sorted and cleaned, I hate a dirty kitchen.  I'm hoping that by February I'll have some sort of habit and will be able to keep it up.  I know I should of sorted this years ago and when the kids were little I was okay with the cleaning and cooking but the past few years between working and my health not being good I kind of lost the plot!

Another things I'm trying to do is to find something to smile or laugh about every day!  Usually the cats.  But the kids keep me amused as well.  They have stories from their work to tell me which can be funny.  I need to laugh more.

This made me laugh. We found out that the noise that a comb makes when you run your fingers over the teeth makes the cats gag. It's so weird, all the cats react in the same way!