If you've been keeping up (and if you haven't, why not?!), you know that I timed this particular 21-day 'salute' a little poorly, forgetting that I had a three-day conference that would fall squarely in the middle.

The point of these 'salutes', for me, anyway, because I can't speak for you, dear reader, is to replace an old habit with a new one: in this case, letting things get wildly out of control rather than taking care of things day by day, bit by bit, and tackling the bigger things as time allows.

So far, I'm pleased to say, it's been working. Especially given the presence of an additional, trash-generating human being on the premises for the last week, things stayed remarkably under control. Committing to a few daily tasks helped enormously; knowing the bed was made, the dishes done each night, the trash emptied went a long way towards both peace of mind and general crap level.

I picked up some bug in the desert, so I doubt I'll get much major cleaning done in the home stretch. But the habit seems to be in place, so I also doubt I'll be left with a trash heap to sort through when I'm finally feeling 100% again. I'm not pushing too hard; I'm doing what I feel up to, mainly the dishes, the bed and some minor clutter-clearing.

And I'm asking for help when I need it. The BF was working on some pretty tight deadlines yesterday, but was still gracious to step up and use one of his 10-minute breaks to do the dishes when I asked. He even took the trash downstairs completely unprompted, thereby making himself even smoking-hotter in my eyes than he was before.

So that's my takeaway thus far from this little experiment: (a), slow and steady wins the race.

And (b), you will get laid better and more often if you learn to take out the trash on your own steam...

xxx c

Image by chrysophylax via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license