I'm FLYing again!

You know, I've never claimed to have invented any of these systems. I just adapt what I find. And one my earliest gurus was the dorky, square, hopelessly lame Flylady.

Who is the Flylady? Well, in the world of Hints from Heloise and Good Housekeeping, she's an icon. In fact, she's a little purple icon with a black curvy Betty Rubble bob and a fishing pole who loves acronyms. She's got a whole online world, that sends instructions about how to keep your own world tidy and organized.

If I sound passive aggressive in my praise, let me apologize. I truly love Marla (the Flylady's real name). I've got the emails in my Yahoo account from 2004 to prove it. I tried so hard to be consistent at home keeping. My goal was to follow the system exactly, but it never quite fit for me. Maybe there were too many testimonials from Stay At Home Moms, or women that wanted to host church gatherings, or others completely caught up in the American consumer nightmare, and that's never how I pictured myself, or could even have imagined myself ever wanting to be. I could not taste the reward, and therefore the recipe made no sense.

But I'm back at it, and it's different this time. Having seen how Gretchen Rubin pays respect, and Apartment Therapy uses her ideas, I was able to look at it in a new way. Babysteps, Jump In Where You Are, Finally Loving Yourself (FLYing!) - these are all (pretty self-explanatory) concepts I kept in my heart, even after the rest of the systems fell apart. 

Oddly, it restarted recently by realizing that I was wasting weekends by sleeping too late. Next, while recovering from surgery, I realized I was completely ruining Sunday with the endless laundry that sometimes stretched until Tuesday before all of the clothing had returned from the basement. And, by some miracle of timing, Flylady started using Constant Contact, which put the emails back in my Yahoo account, at just the right time. 

So last week, I followed most of the Zone Cleaning missions, and did a load of laundry about every other day. It was a miracle. My kitchen is clean. My laundry will never be done, but it will also not be an overwhelming mountain of fabric and stair climbing ever again. And it's not that hard to do, but it makes such a difference. 

Big ups to you, Flylady. (That's dorky, hopelessly lame, faux-hip hop lingo for "Thank you".) I look forward to a HURP (House Under Reconstruction Processes). Yeah, that doesn't spell a real word because that's another skill I don't have. Fly on and inspire us all, my purple friend.