Cleaning for Company - Why Do I Care Again?

It was announced Thursday at work (a little after 12pm) that all overtime was cancelled effective immidiately and to please make any necessary changes to our schedules.  Generally I work 6 days a week when OT is in effect and even worked 84 days in a row this past Winter/Spring.  I was not pleased about the last minute notice that my paychecks were going to be significantly smaller for the forseeable future (they usually bring OT back in the fall) but I was positively livid when I was told that I was expected to work Sun-Thurs as my FT schedule or lose the benefits of being able to work on a somewhat less hateful task each week (translation more time doing cold-calling).

I have since made peace with this news and am looking forward to the benefits that having a Friday off will hold:

• I will have my day off on a day that typically finds Mr. Grumpy working outside the home
• I will be able to look into taking a day class for the Fall semester instead of only considering night classes
• I will have a day with fewer child-based interuptions and can use it to work on the blog, work on homework, or even work on a book idea that has been coming together more and more (I have a good concept and a working title and everything)
• I will have a day that allows me to run to the post office, take care of Dr. appointments, or tend to other tasks which are difficult to do when your only day off is a Saturday

In other news I spent the bulk of my day off today cleaning the house for company tomorrow evening.  The entire downstairs is done and I even did some clutter control as I went.  I got rid of 3 kitchen-size bags of trash (mostly stuff from the kids art supply cabinet, broken toys, and so forth.  I filled 2 plastic supermarket shopping bags full of goodies for the 4-year-old daughter of a woman I work with. 

I even cleared the downstairs a bit with sound, walking around the house ringing a bell to break up any stagnant chi.  I lit a cake-scented candle in the kitchen before heading upstairs to replace the smell of cleaning supplies with a warm happy yummy type of smell instead.

Now, I am off to work on the upstairs.  More general tidy (with a dash of shoving things in our master bedrom) and a cleaning of the bathroom.  If I can get it all done tomorrow we can head over to the community pool for a couple of hours before its time to each shower, dress, and generally beautify for the reason behind all of this cleaning.

Tomorrow we are going out with various family members for dinner to celebrate Mr. Grumpy’s birthday and then coming back to the house for cake.  I do not get along all that well with my family for various reasons, but the PC part of me will blame it on the fact that while age-wise they are between my father and I, they are part of his generation on the family tree and they are closer to him than they have ever been to me.

Translation … Dad will have a good time, the kids will have a good time as my cousins’ kids are the same age as my kids (though Miss Artistic is the oldest by a couple of years), and GamerDude & I will end the night (as we generally do) feeling a bit like outsiders.  I’d like to say that I’m used to having family-time evoke these feelings, but I never seem to get over feeling a bit bruised by it.

Oh well.  At least there’s a restaurant meal in it for us.  LOL

 

WIsh you all well

Be Blessed

Mama Kelly