Spring Cleaning/Summer Goals

Memorial Day was spent scrubbing my kitchen and the downstairs bath. I've been working on them a little at a time, but Monday gave me a whole day to simply focus on Spring cleaning. It is surprising how much I enjoy cleaning these days. I had Kurt move all the appliances and thoroughly enjoyed scraping the dust off of our refrigerator coils. Kurt scrubbed the back deck and began the process of cleaning out the garage. We want the garage to provide more rainy day play space this year, which means we've got to get those last few boxes out of there.
While scrubbing I had time to start formulating summer goals, here's what I've got so far.
1. Ride my bike to the library. I'm not very good on my bike, but it's great exercise. I've always wanted to master the machine. Maybe this summer is the summer.
2. Do more walking and less driving. We live in a beautiful village with almost everything you need within a reasonable walking distance. With gas prices going through the roof and my new environmental consciousness, I'm going to take advantage of small town living.
3. Ditch television, with the only exception being a weekly family DVD and possible sick day entertainment. This will be hard with all the great stuff there is to Netflix--I've grown addicted to the documentaries.
4. Work in cultural enrichment activities from the free section of the Entertainment calendar in the newspaper. We found some great stuff last summer, weekly concerts of various styles of music, an archaeological dig, and kiting gatherings. Not to mention our local library's terrific offerings for kids.
5. Get back in the habit of reading. Ordinarily, I read all the time, but recently what with writing a novel, publicizing Heifer, and the new cleaning obsession, not much reading is going on. The books are piling up.
6. Eat more salads. We want to picnic most nights this summer, and I like salads when I picnic. Sure, KFC is the classic option, and I'm not under-rating it, but chicken salad is better for you. I'm going to become a salad recipe maven. I'll post the best ones.
7. Recycle. We used to recycle at our last house, but we never got around to setting up the service here in Spring Lake. I'd like to get my sorting bins back in action.
8. Finally and irrevocably build the habit of daily cleanup into my children. We keep working away, and little by little the habit is coming along, but summer provides real opportunity to tighten the screws--I mean create incentives. If we have to miss swim class or their newly earned tennis lessons, the message just might get through that doing chores is non-negotiable. That's much harder to teach during the school year. If I make them go back and fix their rooms that means less time in school. Summer is my opportunity.
So, what are you doing this summer? I'd love to hear from you.