Pre-Vacation Jitters (and more cleaning)

I've had a few people ask me why I'm so anxious to get the house cleaned up before we leave. I have lots of reasons...

~ I want to come back to a clean house.
~ I hope that the landlord is going to do some work in here while we're gone, so I want it to be clean.
~ The neighbor is going to be getting my mail and bringing it into the house and doing a walk-through each day to make sure that everything's fine, so I want it to be clean.
~ It's a good excuse to do some deep cleaning that I've been ignoring for a while.

But really, probably the biggest reason is that my nerves are shot. Completely and totally shot.

Why?

Because we are ready to go on this trip. The van is ready, we have all of the "stuff" that we need, and the finances are in place. We could leave right now if we wanted to.

But we can't. We have 14 more days to go before we can leave. I am so terrified that something is going to happen between now and then, and we won't be able to go. I'm afraid that something is going to happen to the van, or someone is going to get sick, or there's going to be some horribly expensive something go wrong that is going to prevent us from going.

My. Nerves. Are. Shot.

I want to go. But we can't go yet. I'm worse than a kid counting down the days until Christmas right now.

When I get stressed about something, I do two things. (1.) I eat. (2.) I clean. I'm trying very hard not to eat myself stupid (failing on that one) so I am focusing on cleaning.

I have gotten rid of a ton of stuff already. I've shipped stuff out to people that I promised to ship to them months ago. I've shredded 7 shredder cans' worth of paper. I've recycled more crap than I care to think about. I filled my big trash can to the top the other night before it had to go out to the curb.

One thing about it. My house will be clean by the time that the trip actually gets here.

I didn't do as much cleaning today as I wanted to, but in my defense I had a couple of extra kids here during the day so things were a little chaotic. But, my older 3 are now gone for the next (almost) week so I have a little more time to get things done without it being immediately trashed again.

I mainly focused on the area around my desk this evening. I'm not sure why the first picture came out so blurry, but you can still get an idea of what it looked like before. Keeping this area clean is a challenge because, well, it gets used. A lot.

Now, I am going to try to stop cleaning, stop eating, and go sew for a little while. I need to do something to keep my mind occupied.