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Famous last words from my last post re. spring cleaning:
We’re chipping away at it a little every day, and I know that by the end of our holiday we’ll be living in a clean, serene and organized space.
HA! Well, the universe certainly didn’t have that in store for us. We did make some great progress on our spring cleaning in the first few days of our holiday, but eventually life caught up with us. I got clobbered with a nasty migraine for a couple of days, and later my stepmum ended up going to the ER with appendicitis and having emergency surgery. Yikes! (She’s recovering very well, by the way. Phew!) Needless to say, some things are higher priority in life than re-alphabetizing the spice drawer.
But we did actually manage to relax a little too. My partner and I spent his birthday luxuriating at Le Nordik, an outdoor spa in Quebec, followed by a wonderful lunch at a great little vegetarian place, Le Cafe Soupe ‘Herbe. Absolutely wonderful. I also had a fun day hanging out with my mom, and went to see a totally sweet movie – Bedtime Story – with my volunteer match (part of a group I volunteer with). And hey, the weather wasn’t half bad. So all in all, I think it was a pretty good week off.
Now our challenge is to keep hacking away at the spring cleaning now that we’re back to our busy work schedules. The apartment is totally nutty with sorting boxes blanketing the living room floor, not to mention the plant re-potting station set up in the middle of the kitchen floor. The half-way mess is driving me even more crazy than the initial mess! Hopefully we can blast the rest of it on the weekend.
But honestly, I am just so excited to have the time and mental space to get the apartment organized! My partner and I have been mostly staying away from our computers, enjoying the quiet, and getting to bed early. Then in the mornings, we’ve been leaping out of bed ready to clean! (Well, I leap into cleaning while he leaps into making a delicious green smoothie!)
Whenever I read about personal finance, specifically stuff about how to pay off debts, the mantra is generally “decrease spending and increase income,” but the emphasis always seems to be on decreasing spending. I don’t doubt that that’s the better of the two strategies, since if you’re in the hole it’s best to stop digging. But at the same time, as I try to curtail my unnecessary spending (which I’m having mixed success with, *cough..shoes..cough*), I thought, why not balance this with trying to bring in some extra income? So I sat down and made a little plan:
I am so in love with second hand stores, flea markets, antique stores, garage sales, consignment shops – anything where I can find interesting and unusual stuff. I’m lucky that there are quite a few neat little places like this in my neighbourhood.
