Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, September 13, 1993                   TAG: 9309290313
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Monty S. Leitch
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

GET BUSY

This is really just a glorified utility closet (water heater, fuse box, well tank, spiders) to which we've added a few wide shelves for the big pans and Tupperware that won't fit anywhere else. After we added the shelves, I tried calling the pump room "the pantry," but the name didn't stick. There've occasionally been snakes there. Snakes in the pump room are one thing; snakes in the pantry, something else again.

Anyway, on the plumber's last visit (they've been alarmingly frequent lately) he left a gal-danged mess that, for a couple of weeks now, I've been meaning to clean up.

The other day I took a notion to do it: haul out all the big pans and Tupperware, the vacuum cleaner, ironing board, broken appliances, canning jars, humidifier and plunger, and clean up the mess.

Then, once I got all that junk out, I took a notion to paint the pump room while I was at it. Which is something I've been meaning to do for a couple of years now.

That was just about one notion too many. But once you get a pile of junk hauled out of your pump room and into your kitchen, you have little choice but to finish the job. The future use of your kitchen depends on it.

So I finished the job, which explains all these aching joints.

Not all the notions that get taken in life have such compelling drives to conclusion, though. Suppose, for instance, you take a notion to make yourself a "cathedral window" quilt. You get all your fabrics. You get yourself a special cutting board and neat little rotary cutter so you can make the necessary one zillion perfect squares.

Then, say that while you're working, you get to thinking about all the courses you wish you'd taken in college; and so you take a notion to make a special study, all on your own, now that you're in your 40s, of regional geology.

Of course, you have to put away your rotary cutter and the half-dozen perfect squares you've cut in order to make space on the dining room table for all the books you'll need to check out of the library.

But it doesn't matter. Because the quilt stuff will still be there whenever you take a notion to get back to it. And most of the library books will still be in the library, too, the next time you want them; but for right now, you have to return them because you've taken a notion to enter an aerobics class four mornings a week, and who can read when she's sweaty?

I have little half-completed projects tucked away all over the house. Things I took a notion to do, and even got a fine start on, before some other notion took me.

Yesterday, while painting the pump room, it struck me that most of these projects have gotten under way in the fall. Crisp air, cool nights, the life-long expectations that "Back to School" has drilled into every head: This year - bigger and better! Fatter books, more homework, better grades.

And that's what we really, really mean to do. But before you know it, it's Halloween, our national goofing-off holiday. Then it's Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's Eve. Talk about taking notions: They get taken on and on.

But unless they've totally wrecked your kitchen ... well, you know. Something else will come up.

\ Monty S. Leitch is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.