Apparently last week’s Seven-Day Project turned out to be to become a workaholic and forget about everything else. I succeeded at this.

When I chose the week’s Seven-Day Project I never realized that I was going to be working a few twelve-hour days and some time over the weekend. By Thursday I knew that I was not going to be able to complete the project successfully, but didn’t want to admit defeat until the final day.

In the future I will attempt this project again with a slight twist. My house is really too large for one person so I will propose to clean all rooms on the main floor one week and all rooms in the basement during another.

It’s on days like today that I remind myself that this is called a “Seven-Day” Project instead of a “Task-A-Day” Project. In the former I have seven days to complete a specified task in the latter I must perform a specified task a day. If the Seven-Day Project lends itself to daily repetition it makes for better blogging, not necessarily for a better project.

After arriving home from work at 7pm and then making and eating dinner there was no way to convince myself to clean a room in my house. After dinner all of my initiative was spent on making sure that I didn’t allow my desk to become cluttered with the day’s mail; on that I was successful.

So I didn’t clean a room yesterday. So what. I still have four days in order to complete this Project.

Tuesday’s task was to clear up my den.

Before

Along with the crap on the floor my work desk (not pictured) was covered with paperwork and dust. My den sees a lot of activity. It is the room in which I do the majority of my computer work, and it’s the room that receives all of my snail mail.

In order to properly clean the room I had to clear off all surfaces so that they could be dusted. The first task was to determine where the things which were cluttering the floor needed to go. Some of the items are destined to to be donated, while others are destined for the next community electronics recycling.

After

I’d guess that I cleaned about 90% of the den. The floor still needed to be swept and the chair against the picture wall needs to be cleared of junk and then gotten rid of.

Since I got a late start on this week’s Seven-Day Project I thought I’d toss myself a softball for the first day. In February I had assigned myself the task to clean and organize the master bedroom, so picking it as the room to clean for Day 1 wasn’t that hard of a decision.

In my defense I did still take the task to heart. I took out the dust mop and cleaned the floor. I cleared off the desk, nightstand, and chest of drawers and dusted each. In replacing the items which belong on the desk, nightstand, and chest of drawers I moved the items which do not belong on them to the places where they do belong.

This being my bedroom I also picked up the dirty laundry which was on the floor (not much mind you) and placed it all into the hamper.

Finally, I put away the space heater (hopefully until Winter) which has taken up residence in the bedroom along with the freezing temperatures which hampered us over the past few months.

As I type this I realize that I probably should have used this as a good opportunity to do some before/after photography. Note to self: start this Tuesday.

They say that cleanliness is next to godliness. I’m going to try and get a little closer to godliness this week. The idea to clean a room a day came from my friend Randy and goes nicely with a project that I have been attempting this year.

Basically, there are eleven rooms in my house, namely:

• Upstairs
1. Kitchen
2. Den
3. Living Room
4. Dining Room
5. Master Bedroom
6. Master Bathroom
7. Guest Bedroom
8. Guest Bathroom
• Downstairs
1. Barroom
2. Barroom Bathroom
3. Game Room

So in order to complete my mission I’ll have to clean two rooms a day for four of the seven days. Rooms such as the kitchen will definitely be one that gets its own day, the others are still undetermined.

Buy what will I consider “successful” cleaning? Basically I will look to sweep/vacuum/mop the floor, dust all of the surfaces, pick up and put away all items on the floor which do not belong on the floor. For rooms such as the kitchen, and bathrooms I will also need to clean the sink, counter tops, shower and toilet (obviously only in the bathrooms).

This will be an incredibly difficult task for me. It’s not that I am unclean, but I tend to let the house get a bit untidy at times and paying that much attention to cleanliness is likely to cause me grief. That being said, it will also be incredibly satisfying to have a clean house at week’s end and this is one Seven-Day Project that I will strive to maintain.

Forgive me, I went away on a three-and-a-half-day weekend on which I did hours of driving to reach and had no desire to blog during.

Fear not, I maintained vegetarian throughout the silence, with great help of the vegetarian friends whose housed me over the weekend.

On Friday I got up early and grabbed a breakfast of a waffle and small bowl of raisin bran from the hotel’s continental breakfast prior to hitting the road. My drive took me through many small towns, none of which offered much in the way of vegetarian fare. I wound up stopping at Wendy’s for an admittedly unhealthy, but vegetarian, of french fries and a Frosty. I got into Raleigh and joined my friends for a dinner consisting of a veggie burger and beer.

Saturday morning started with a “healthy” portion of a treat called Monkey Bread.

It’s called Monkey Bread

Although it contains no monkey at all, which this week was a good thing.

For lunch we all wound up in a Mexican restaurant where, as tough as it was, I ate a spinach burrito instead of the pork carnitas that my mouth craved. Of course chips, salsa, cheese dip, and a frosty beer accompanied it. At dinner time we decided we were going to try a new(ish) restaurant but after realizing that the only vegetarian options available were appetizers. Instead we wound up at an Asian restaurant where we at green beans, steamed dumplings, Pad Thai with tofu, and a General Tso’s dish made with tempeh. I have to admit that I thought that the tempeh dish was delicious and I will be attempting to recreate it in the future.

Today we went out for a breakfast before I hit the road. I consumed a mushroom/cheddar omelet served up with some home fries and a biscuit. Because of my travels I never stopped for lunch, although I did pick up a Cheerwine at my gas stop. I successfully finished off the vegetarian week by cooking up a couple of frozen biscuits and ate them with some brie cheese.

I ate well this week, probably well enough to put on a pound or two (I’ll find out tomorrow). Truth be told, I didn’t miss eating meat this week (much) but could never see myself becoming a full-time vegetarian any time soon.

Sorry again about the lack of posting this week.

Thanks for reading,
Paulie

My appetite was suppressed yesterday thanks to an illness which reared its ugly head.

Breakfast
Since I stayed at home from work I ate a later breakfast than I normally would. I decided to play with my on-going effort to perfect baking frozen biscuits and eggs in a toaster oven. I was attempting a “pot pie” method where I par-baked the biscuits before putting it over the raw egg and baking both to completion. The result was okay, but far from perfect.

Take my word, there’s a baked egg under that biscuit.

With my breakfast I drank a large glass of milk.

Lunch
Skipped due to the lateness of my breakfast.

Dinner
I realized last night that I had some vegetables from last week’s Seven-Day Project that needed to be consumed before they go bad. What better to do than to whip up a pasta sauce to go along with some bow-tie pasta. My sauce consisted of the following:

• tomatoes
• onions
• cabbage (yes, cabbage)
• peas and carrots
• garlic
• oregano
• basil
• parsley
• brown sugar
• salt
• lemon juice
• water

I basically just continued to tweak the mixture while cooking over medium heat until it developed into a taste I liked.

And here’s my creation…

Three down.
Four to go.

I met with the group of $30/week participants last night at Decatur’s Cakes & Ale. Needless to say, we didn’t consider eating and drinking cheaply.

Breakfast
Breakfast was a simple fare of coffee and a couple of Fruit & Nut Granola bars purchased from one of my coworker’s stash of products he keeps in his desk. It was far from the most glorious breakfast I’ve ever eaten, but it did its job of keeping me filled until lunch.

Lunch
Luckily for me I work in a building that has a small mom-and-pop cafeteria inside of it. I went down for lunch and got them to make me a veggie burger. It was not a traditional veggie burger in that it was served on a hoagie roll, but it was quite edible… and all vegetarian.

Dinner
I should have known immediately that this one meal would easily shatter the budget for the entirety of last week when I found out that the pint of Anchor Steam that I ordered at the bar was going to cost me $7.

Keeping with my vegetarian plan for this week I ordered the menu’s only vegetarian option, the gnocchi. The only problem was that they had just sold their last gnocchi. The night was saved however when the person at my table who ordered that gnocchi offered to get something else so that I could have the gnocchi. Since I was going whole-hog (so to speak) I also ordered a dessert, a Meyer Lemon Baked Alaska which was divine.

One of the best things about dessert? They rarely contain meat.

The bill was obscene and when you add in the $7 beer and $10 glass of wine that I had at the bar I came close to spending three week’s $30/week budget. Sometimes you’ve got to splurge…

Two down.
Five to go.

With the budget restriction lifted this week first thing I did was think about where I was going to eat dinner. I have to admit, it was good to have this option.

Breakfast
I was running late this morning so breakfast was going to have to be something I had readily available. Luckily for me I still had two slices of bread and at least a half a jar of peanut butter remaining at the office. With that in mind the breakfast dilemma was solved. With my peanut butter sandwich I gulped down a cup of the company coffee.

Lunch
Even though I knew that this week’s challenge was going to be eating only vegetarian food this week I wasn’t really prepared for lunch. I still had a container of white rice in the refrigerator at work and scrounged around my “food drawer” where I located a box of Bengal Lentils.

All Natural And Vegetarian.

Dinner
Time to splurge with little time to waste. By the time I left the office, around 8pm, I was pretty hungry. I knew that I could get vegetarian food almost anywhere, but wanted to eat quickly. I decided to stop at Willy’s Mexicana Grill for a tofu burrito and some chips. Even though I wasn’t watching the budget I decided to drink water with my Willy’s meal.

One thing I noticed was that for the first time in a week I felt over-stuffed after a meal. Maybe not eating out is a blessing for my waist along with my wallet.

One down.
Six to go.