I love housework. In my household, I am responsible for washing the dishes, running the laundry, cleaning the cat boxes, washing the bathrooms, and taking out the trash. B. cooks, vacuums, and makes long-term household decisions. The wonderful thing about housework is that it is right there in front of you. You can see what needs to be done, you do it, and it is done. The feedback is instantaneous. Two or three times a day, and at the end of dinner, I’ll walk through the kitchen and see the sink full of dishes. It is real easy to empty the dishwasher, put the dirty dishes in, if the dishwasher is full, run it, and then wipe down the counters and other surfaces. Ten or fifteen minutes of work and you have a sparkling kitchen. Immediate gratification.

The other thing I love, and will do when I am sad, is to arrange books on the bookshelves. Folks in my household take books out and then leave them on surfaces when they are bored with them. I very carefully put them on top of the books near where they should go. When I have a need to work out the frustrations of life, I go through and line up the books, filling in the ones that were taken out in their proper sequence (alphabetic by author for fiction and topical for non-fiction) and line up all the spines. That takes a little longer than cleaning up the kitchen, but the result is orderliness. It is very satisfying to be able to impose order on some small portion of ones environment.

I just got through doing both of those chores. I feel much better about life.