Sweating the small stuff

Why is everything such a chore? I ask myself this at least twice a day usually while I’m doing something exasperating like  … a chore. 

“How many half-lives does this thin line of dog hair and sand have?” I wonder aloud each time I pull the dustpan away from my successive and futile attempts at a clean sweep. 

Occasionally I consider all the labor-intensive solutions I might employ – a lint roller, a microfiber towel, luring the dog over and crossing my fingers that something will appeal to her discerning taste buds mixed within its granular composition.

I shrug my shoulders, figuring that even if I am successful, she’d turn my dust bowl into a mud puddle and then I’d have another task: to fill up a bucket and find the mop. 

A shine forms on my upper lip as I lean more heavily on the brush, flinging the finicky particles in the opposite direction of the pan toward the great outdoors, where they stubbornly catch on a threshold.

Droplets of perspiration reach their tipping points as I reach for the vacuum to end this battle once and for all. When I slip in my own sweaty puddles I realize I’d lost any economy I’d tried to endeavor through one simple task. 

As I fill the bucket with warm sudsy water, I wonder about how many steps I add each time I try to pare them down.

Like … after I’d dragged our luggage to the porch and tidied the kitchen

of our “summer rental,” my brain ticked off the box near the words “IDIOT CHECK” at the bottom of my “To Do” list. 

I would have surely noticed any personal items left there, such as pill bottles, toothbrushes, and charging cords as I was giving the countertop one last scrub. Certainly, I would have ferried them off to the porch to await their connecting passage to the car. 

This is why my brain told me as I dropped the last bag of trash into the receptacle on the curb and dusted my hands.

“Done! We are ready to go!”

Of course, I didn’t think about my historical failures of multitasking until the day after we’d arrived home and the watch on my wrist started to vibrate with its semi-weekly plea for recharging. 

As I pawed through the bags I had yet to unpack, I could only retrieve the memory of unplugging, coiling, and packing one charging cord, not two.

Ugggggh. 

“Do you want me to call and see if it’s there? Maybe they could mail it to us,” my husband said, trying to be helpful. 

He even threw himself under the “final checks” bus, assuring me HE had been the last one to leave, having dragged his eagle eyes over every surface looking for any absentminded abandonments. 

But I don’t want to put anyone out. 

I briefly consider using this as an excuse to purchase a new watch when the brain I couldn’t rely on to do the idiot check regains its senses.

“Search for a replacement cord, you dolt. Use the power Amazon gave you.”

So, just a few mouse clicks later I had purchased a replacement cord listed for less than it would have cost to ship the original to me by post, (and free at that because of the sleight of hand known as credit card points). 

But I also have the same feeling of perplexity of this chore. Why does this

seem too easy?