This blogging thing is way harder than I figured when I started earlier this year.  In addition to my proclivity to not finish things, I am among the worlds best at putting things off.  I have great intentions, but you know where that path goes.  When I started, I was going to write twice a week and finish my book and get all kinds of writing gigs and move and find a new job and remodel this house and start a couple of other blogs and start my own business and . . . well, nothing.  I won’t say that I haven’t done any of those things, but I just try to do whatever pops into my brain without thinking through all the unintended consequences.  That’s my EDD kicking in (Easily Distracted Disorder).

My Doctor told me I wasn’t 20 anymore yesterday.  I was just shocked!!  How dare she remind me that I’m “mature”.  Then she started listing my ailments (I won’t bore you with them) and just shook her head.  I’m not 20 and she shakes her head and then she doesn’t get my great joke about the paint on the back of my hand being some sort of skin cancer.  Some people have no sense of humor.  I am tired of being told, whether implicitly or explicitly that I’m old.  I’m not old, well, parts of me are beginning to feel old.  Mostly though I feel like a kid play-acting at being a grown up.  I feel like one day Dorothy’s little dog is going to come to my “magic” booth and pull back the curtain and expose me for the old fraud that I am.

Today, I’m about 8.  The pool guys are here pouring concrete.  My inner 8 year old is just fascinated.  My outer not-eight year old is glad I’m not the one out in the cold pouring concrete.  Well, it is cool, maybe 65, cold for us.  The dock guys are here also, in fleeces and long pants.  Still having some Kentucky residual acclimation I think it’s wonderful, but then I don’t have to get in the canal or wade through ankle deep concrete either.  The concrete guys are using this giant hose to pump the concrete back to the deck area and the little boy is me just wants to sit and watch instead of write and work and clean.

When I was a kid, no one told me that being an adult entailed so much cleaning.  If I had known how much clean up duties there were, I would have stayed 8.  When I was 8, my Mom cleaned everything.  When our kids were little my wife stayed home to raise them and she cleaned.  Now, she is out working and I am the stay-at-home-take-care-of-the-house person and I have a whole new appreciation for cleaning.  Or maybe dirt and dust and sand.  (Yeah, I know who would have thought there would be sand in Florida?)  I wanted hardwood floors in the whole house, but forgot that hardwood and laminate and vinyl have to be MOPPED.  I remember my Mom mopping and with three teen-aged boys at the same time, she mopped a lot.  Like most people around us when I was a kid, we had packed dirt for the walkways.  That means dust in the summer and mud in the spring and fall and ice in the winter.  And we were the kind of family that wore our shoes inside.  Now I’m balancing out all the work Mom did with the little bit of sweeping and mopping that I do.  And by mopping I mean take out the swiffer thingy and squirt that smelly stuff on the floor and then throw away the dirty “cloth” thingy on the bottom.

How did I get from whining about blogging to mopping floors?  Welcome to my wife’s world.  My thought processes don’t so much flow as meander.  I gotta go clean up the paint I spilled on the floor that didn’t come up when I “mopped”.