I guess I'm going to leave the moderation on for a few more days.

I personally don't like comment moderation; it puts the work on me to approve the comments (rather than delete the few spam comments I might receive). I know people hate captcha words, but it's the easiest way for me to avoid lots of bot-spam, without my having to moderate.

I'm in for a while today (in my office). A student needed to finish a research project and as we get Good Friday off (I think this is the only campus I've been on that does that) and the only Good Friday activities at church are aimed at the little kids (a pretzel-making activity with the pastor and his wife, and a sort of Protestant version of the stations of the cross), I don't need to be there (also, it's much later in the day). I did miss the Tenebrae service because I had another meeting, and I'm kind of sad about that - they asked me to be a reader (they were doing readers reading "as individuals who had known Christ" and I bet they would have given me Mary Magdalene if I had asked). But this meeting was a prior commitment.

When I was a kid, I never had the situation of being asked to two birthday parties on the same day (I got asked to very few birthday parties as a kid...) but as an adult, I sometimes find myself double-booked, and double-booked in a way that they thing I would have gotten more out of isn't possible because of prior commitments.

So anyway, I'm here to do two soil samples (the most I can manage before allergic overload, and I'm sure part of my distress and general "meh" feeling these past couple weeks has been allergies). And then I'm going to go home and finish cleaning house.

I had been so busy, and it had gotten really bad. And I find I am truly distressed - and cannot relax properly, and can't really enjoy what free time I have - if the place is a mess.

It's not clutter that bothers me - I am the queen of clutter - but it's stuff being out of place, and stacks of undealt-with mail (which usually works out to: pitch all that catalogs even if I was vaguely considering ordering something - so it saves me money, too). And having a less-than sparkling kitchen bothers me.

I got the kitchen and the living room (and the little hall, which is actually in the middle of the house) done yesterday. This morning, before running over here, I did some pick up in the guest room. I still have to attack the stack of boxes that are in one corner of the dining room. (And where do I take them now? Wal-mart corporate apparently deemed that there Shall Be No Recycling Bins On Store Premises and we don't have the recycling set-up there any more. Also, it's raining.)

And I have to do the bathroom - scrub the tub and the floor, put away some stuff.

Already I feel some better. I think part of the whole house-not-clean-enough thing plays into my feeling that I am an "imaginary grownup" - that I'm not, by virtue of the fact that I never married or had kids - not a really-real grownup, and that I have to prove harder to people that I am - that I have to be MORE responsible because I live a life that some would claim is just an extended adolescence without parental supervision.

( I do remember part of a Phyllis Diller routine where she said that her house was often a mess, and if someone called and said they were coming over, she'd quick throw on pajamas and a bathrobe, grab a stack of get-well cards she kept in a drawer and put them on the mantel, and sham that she had a REALLY bad cold, and that was why the house was a mess.)


But, all of that anxiety aside, I do like having a clean house for myself. And it seems right to do an extensive cleaning in the spring. (I often wonder if the tradition of spring cleaning is a holdover from the Jewish Passover tradition, where the family would extensively clean the house to get rid of all traces of "leaven" before the holiday). Although perhaps, more mundanely, in New England, it was more a dealing-with-Mud-Season-after-it-ended.

So hopefully, I can get the rest of the cleaning done today, and I can have tomorrow (or part of tomorrow, if I decide to come in here and risk my allergies again with two more soil samples) to sit in my clean quiet house and either knit or quilt. (It's been too long. I hate being so busy that I have to take grading home with me and the what feels like only a couple hours between arriving home and going to bed be totally occupied with grading)