Is Anything Working

The meme of this blog, as you know, is one of complaint. I don’t want anyone to think I’m too happy or anything. For one thing, happiness in other people can be pretty annoying. For another, I’m pretty sure it’s bad luck, in a Calvinist way, hem. For another, problems and sadness make more interesting reading. Do any of us pick up a novel to read about a nice person sitting in a meadow eating marshmallows? I don’t think so. Not unless it turns out the person is secretly evil and the marshemellows are made by, drum roll, breathless hush, Monsanto! Or something like that. No no, it’s everything going wrong that makes interesting reading. Besides, my life has been given as a warning, as opposed to an example, to others. I take that calling with a pinch of gravity. To say it another way, I’ll Do Almost Anything to keep you reading.

So, what happens when stuff’s not that terrible? What happens when you’re mucking around in the kitchen muttering to yourself and your child comes in and says, “Can I help you?” What happens when you get to the end of the mountain of laundry and you stand looking at would should be devastation and woe and find that it’s all either folded and put away, or tumbling over quietly in the drier, and that the floor under your warm slippered feet is clear? What happens when you determined to make bread and soup and so you did, without catastrophe? “That’s not good for the blog!” you wail quietly to yourself.

On the other hand, it is great for your actual life. Isn’t the purpose of having children, or at least one of the main ones, to ensure that you won’t always be doing all the dishes yourself? To guarantee that at least at Thanksgiving and Christmas, younger stronger people than you will scrub down your kitchen cabinets? That you’ll sit rubbing your hurting knees and listening to everyone complain about how hard their lives are while they do the washing up. So at some point shouldn’t the children rise up and say, “can I help you?”

And as to the laundry. Well, I did sort of decide that I would try to spend ten to twenty minutes a day chipping away at it. My previous method of not ever doing it didn’t seem to really be working. So I have basically been muddling away down there for a few weeks, just a little bit every day. If I was a secular humanist I would attribute having Done All The Laundry to some kind of verifiable natural phenomenon. But we all know that can’t possibly be. It was a miracle that God got me down there every day. It’s a miracle that I finally thought of doing it. God gets the praise, and the blame, not that there’s any blame.

No, I’m so so sorry, Gentle Reader. There is nothing terrible to report. The children are acting obedient and helpful. They did extra school yesterday to make up from being sick without complaint and without reproach. The week begins with the laundry caught up and with half the cooking for the week done. The school room is picked up. Calm and Order reign. I’m not even that depressed about the weather. I guess you’ll have to leave this disappointing blog and go read the news. But check back tomorrow! I promise! The little girls will totally do something awful! Or it will turn out I didn’t put salt in the bread.

Have a lovely day. Sniff.