Quit Meaning to Do It and Just Do It

For a while now, I've been meaning to scrub our coffee mugs.  Not just wash them.  I do that all the time.  No, I mean scrub them.  Get the coffee stains out. Get the weird gray smudges from their encounters with metal gone.  All the little spoon marks inside wiped out.  White mugs should, by their nature, be white.

So, this morning, I did it*.  All the mugs are clean except for the two we're currently using for coffee infusion.

And as I sat down afterwards, I thought to myself that there are a lot of things on my list I've been 'meaning to do'.  I get to these things as they approach 'irritating the crap out of me' stage.  Floor washing was a big one, but I did that last week.  Another one was scrubbing the bottoms of my frying pans.  Hit that last month.

Hey, it's close enough to Spring now that I must be hitting my Spring cleaning stride.  Or something.

A huge one is repainting all the interior walls of this house, but that is not in the foreseeable future.  I did the painting thing in my bathroom last year.  Maybe if I do one room a year, it wouldn't be such an insurmountable task.  Or so damned expensive.  We'll see how that shakes out later this year.

Anyway, why am I talking about any of this at all?  Well, it kind of reminds me of way back when, when I used to 'mean to write a book one of these days'.  From the time I was like 4, so for about 30 years, I meant to write a book.  Then I just did it.

Yeah, that's an oversimplification, but when you boil it all down, that's pretty much what it is.  If you mean to do it, then do it.  Otherwise, it's just mental masturbation.

Maybe you do it in spurts and it takes you nine months - like my first book.  Maybe you get the NaNo bug and do it in 30 days.  Maybe you're like George RRM and it takes years.  The point is to do it.  Quit meaning to do it.

Or it'll never get done.

What's something you've been meaning to do?  What something you spent a long time meaning to do that you have actually done? 

*I used Soft Scrub All Purpose.  Squirted it in each cup, smeared it all around, let it sit, and then rinsed them thoroughly.  Then I put them in the dishwasher to make sure they're safe to drink out of again.