One of the things that often surprises me when I’m doing household chores is just how little time it takes to wash a few dishes or to make the bed or some other little daily chore like that… because when I think about it, I feel like I got quite a bit done yesterday for relatively minimal effort.

Truth be told, I spent most of the day yesterday goofing off on the Internet.

I wrote a blog post. I talked to some friends on IM. I did a Google+ Hangout with Aunt Becky and some other Band Back Together peeps. I also finished knitting a pair of socks while I was doing that hangout.

See?

I didn’t mobilize to actually start doing anything around the house until everyone started coming home. A rare occurrence happened last night and our roommate got home before James did. I washed the dishes and did a wipe down of the kitchen counter and give the crockpot a wipe down while he told me about his day.

It only took me fifteen minutes to really put an effort in on cleaning up that area.

On the downside, I think that dish soap bottle is sort of a huge eyesore and there’s not really a good place to put it because it’s too tall to fit under that shelf. I’m looking into finding a dispenser that’s under 7″ tall. Does anyone have any thoughts about the foam dispensing ones? I hear those save on soap…

The fact that I’d actually done something pleased James so much that he spent part of his evening decluttering.

He took care of the clutter mess that was on the desk in the kitchen…

And he also cleaned up the hutch around the bookcase.

I cleaned off the top of my dresser, taking the clothes that needed to be hung up into the room where they need to be hung up in (though, sadly I didn’t hang them up… I kinda can’t walk in that room) and we turned that into our bar.

I’m not sure what to do with the black cat bottles. I’m told they once housed wine, but that’s long since gone but they’re really cool bottles. They’re over with the bar for lack of a better place to put them but I feel like decoratively, they belong somewhere else. But where?

Ultimately, I am finding that it doesn’t take a lot of time to make a difference in the appearance of my place… It’s more a matter of motivating myself to do it. I feel like I keep getting stuck in this timesuck called the Internet. I swear.. It took me 5 hours just to get through all the blogs I want to read. That’s freaking ridiculous!

One of my projects to overhaul my digital world is to pare down those blogs… I don’t want to knock anybody, but man… I feel like there’s so much junk clogging up my Internet world.

Meanwhile, I ramped it up with the podcasts. I really miss the days when I got to drive around and listen to NPR in the car… so I ended up downloading a bunch of NPR podcasts for me to listen to while I clean the house. One of the things that I’d totally space cased on was the fact that we have two sets of speakers in the house that I can plug a music making device into. We have a set in the living room which has the turntable attached to it as well, and the other day James set up a set of speakers in the kitchen. Do you have any podcasts you love to listen to?