With the exception of a quick drive to Spokane and back last week, I haven't gone anywhere. I likely won't end up going anywhere else for the remainder of this year. Perhaps a trip over the mountains at Christmas, but even that isn't a certainty.

Even more jarring is that I haven't had any houseguests since early January.

Used to be that I would have weekend guests sporadically through the Spring and Summer... then a non-stop parade of guests in Fall and Winter as friends stay with me so they can enjoy the festivities in Tourist Town down the road.

But this year? Zero. Zero houseguests. I just can't do it given that my reduced lung capacity puts me in very real danger of death should I contract COVID-19. Not that it matters, because I think all the festivities in Tourist Town have been canceled for the year anyway.

As you might imagine, any incentive to keep my home clean has vanished like a fart in the wind.*

The RoboVacs have been turned off and I just manually vaccum a couple times a month. I haven't mopped my floors all year. I bought a steam cleaner for disinfecting my floors, but haven't bothered to turn it on even once. Rather than hiding all my kitchen utensils, gadgets, appliances, pots, pans, storage containers, and everything else neatly in the garage while I remodel, they're just stacked on the dining room table and laying around. Needless to say I haven't dusted in months. Why bother if only me and my cats are here to see it? They don't care and I don't want to be bothered. Far better to sit on the couch watching television and eating potato chips than to make my life any less pleasant than it already is.

Nah. No need to clean. I'm good.

And don't even get me started on my garage, which is part wood shop and part dumping ground for crap I don't want to deal with. Like empty cardboard boxes and literal garbage.

Except you kinda do need to get me started on my garage, because before you know it Autumn frost and Winter snows will be here and I need to be able to park inside.

I've decided that cleaning my garage will be my weekend project. But only because it HAS to be. Otherwise I'll have to scrape my car off every morning, and I think we all know how much I absolutely don't want to be doing that.

Check back Monday to see if I actually managed to get motivated to dig in... or whether I've just kicked that football down the field to next weekend.

Right now I think my chances are 50/50.

Probably less than 50/50 if the massive cloud of smoke from Oregon and California blows up this way as it is expected to do. But in that case it's totally not my fault, right?

   
*Many thanks to the movie The Shawshank Redemption, which has made this analogy a part of my vocabulary.