Shoveling Snow (More Rambling)

Today the girls and I shovelled snow for over two hours after church. It made me rethink the idea of having another circular driveway in our next house that we are still hoping to build someday. The plans are finished in my head, and about half done on paper.

It was really wet, heavy snow. It was so heavy in fact that it literally broke my favorite shovel in two. I really don't feel like asking Santa for a new one.

(The word "shovel" looks weird as I am typing it here.)

Anyway, there is always a lot of time to think while doing tasks like this so I came to a few conclusions.

1. I am going to start thinking about my New Year's Resolutions now so I can be working on them and see which ones I can stick with until January 1st and then I can make the easy ones into official resolutions. This seems like a brilliant idea today. We'll see how it pans out.

2. A bad hair day (which I had today) is only temporary, thank goodness. (Also, as I found out, it can always get worse.) It almost made me happy to throw on a hat to go outside and shovel snow. I was not so happy when Hal called me from the church an hour after we were finished and asked me to bring him some lunch, which he has never done before so I figured it must be very necessary. I had to throw my church clothes back on and try to make some sort of sense of my now sopping wet hair (because it was still snowing that wet, heavy snow). Don't tell anyone but I still had my sweat pants on under my skirt. I think it just looked like I'd instantly gained 10 pounds. I'm sure nobody noticed because they were too busy looking at my wet hair.

3. Once again I pondered my most often thought about question - If you could have either one, would you rather have a cook or a maid? Today I figured out the answer once and for all. Cook. A maid seems so much more obvious at first, but then thinking about it nobody really can go through your stuff and sort it and know where to put thing like you can. Also, a cook would (I would think) do their own pots and pans and dishes, which would free up my time immensely. I would also think (hope) they would want to get their own groceries. Best of all, wouldn't it be nice to sit down to a home-cooked meal that you didn't have to do a thing for? Now how about doing this every night? Another point, you don't have to deep clean your house every day, just kind of tidy it up. You have to fix food multiple times a day. Now I'm starting to see why some people eat out so much. It does sound rather convenient, doesn't it.

4. I also thought (a lot) about how I can get a mudroom before we build the new house. The layout of this house just does not work for the stage our family is in. Since we have nowhere to put our wet clothes, this is pretty much what our living room looks like every time it snows:

Pretty welcoming, right? And this was even before Austin and I put our wet clothes somewhere so actually times this mess by two and that's what it usually looks like. AND that's not even showing all the wet boots sitting on the front mat.

5. Returning e-mails. I always feel like I need to answer back so people will know I got their message. Funny because I actually get annoyed by other people who send me unnecessary follow up e-mails. In e-mails I usually try to say something like, "You don't need to write back unless you have the information I need." I wrote someone an e-mail today about something I was going to do for them and they wrote back. Now I feel like I need to write again to acknowledge that I got their e-mail and thank them for thanking me. Otherwise I'll feel like they'll think I'm ungrateful. I just spent literally a whole day a few weeks ago deleting over 2,000 old e-mails in two different accounts. (Or was it 4,000? I can't remember if that was the total or the amount in each account. Anyway, it still took a whole day and I had nothing that was outwardly cleaner to show for it.) Also, I'm annoyed by how quickly people think you should respond. We have too much access to each other these days and it bugs me. Now when someone e-mails me and I'm actually sitting at the computer I still sometimes make myself wait an hour or so to respond because I don't want them to think I have nothing better to do than sit and answer them at their convenience. I don't want my kids to think that they have to be accessible to their friends or anyone else 24/7. What happened to the days we didn't answer our phones because we didn't want to talk to anyone that day because we were busy and didn't want to be interrupted? These days my mom will call and if I don't pick up or am out getting the mail, she'll say on the machine, "I know you're there because you didn't tell me you'd be somewhere else." Some days I feel like lying and saying I'll be gone all day so I won't have to pick up the phone for a few hours.

There were other things I thought about but they were too insignificant to put here or I just can't remember them.

This is one of those posts that I'll probably leave up for a day or so and then delete because it's so embarrassing.

But in the mean time, anyone have any arguments for or against either the maid or the cook? (And on The Brady Bunch, what was Alice? A housekeeper? Does that mean she was both a cook and a maid? And if that's the case, what did Mrs. Brady do all day? Or did she help Alice?)