Wednesday, September 23, 2009

I really am trying

Yesterday while I was trying to get the husband started on his trip, I took a moment to change into regular pants. It is good that I did this, cause he would have locked me out of the house again if I had gone out to say goodbye to him still wearing my pajamas. But I had this feeling that regular clothes would be needed, and I remembered to put my keys in my pocket, and I did not get stuck outside when he started to drive away after he had locked the door behind us.

That was at six in the morning. I would say that I got to work immediately, but that would not be entirely true. I did watch Heroes, though I did not watch it all the way through and got the dishes done and ate breakfast before it was over.

It is odd for me now to have anything accomplished before nine in the morning.

After that I wasted some time trying to find a place to watch The Big Bang Theory, but now I have found a good place for that and it will not be such a headache if I want to watch it and a few other things next week.

After that, I tried to get down to the serious cleaning and sorting. The sorting gets done on the bed. The bed is a large area when no one is on it, so it is perfect for sorting things, except that eventually it has to go back to being used for it's original purpose. So clothes and books and other stuff are piled onto the bed and sorted through, until such time as I can't stand to look at it anymore, and then I go and watch something on Hulu, or I briefly go and deal with something somewhere else in the house. And then it is back to the sorting.

At one point I had thrown away a bag of garbage and had half a box of books to be sold (that in addition to the two and a half boxes I took away Monday), and I was thinking to myself that I had made some major progress. I put a few things out in the hallway that I will probably give to Goodwill. And then it was seven o'clock, and while there wasn't anything particularly interesting that I wanted to see on TV, I still thought it best to clear start clearing the bed as I would want to sleep in a couple of hours, even if I didn't find anything of interest on TV.

So all of this stuff I had been sorting went on the floor. At first, there was an attempt to put the stuff on the floor in some sort of order, so that it would be easier to get going again the next day, but that didn't last long. While not ready for bed yet, and not particularly interested in what was on TV, I was suddenly very interested in having the bed cleared just so that I could sit down on it. About seven-thirty there was just this heap of stuff on the floor.

At that point it looks worse than before I got started. There is just this giant heap of stuff on the floor next to the bed. How is it that I still have all this stuff to go through, after having removed a bag of trash, now three boxes of books, and a few things out in the hall that will probably go to Goodwill? How did I get all of this stuff that I have no room for?

The really baffling thing to me is that while some of this stuff has followed me from place to place and some of it I have had for ten or twenty years, the majority of the stuff that I can't seem to deal with is stuff that I've accumulated since I moved here in 2004. I threw away tons of stuff during the last move, and then bought at least seven units of shelves and added three other pieces of furniture. I have added a few more shelves since then, and still, there is all this stuff that doesn't particularly go anywhere.

Some of the additional stuff has to do with school. There is shelf space taken up by ceramic pieces and other artwork, and then there is a lot of supplies that I don't quite know what to do with, but that doesn't add up to more than can be held in seven units of shelf space. No, I think the rest of it is books and clothes and other stuff, and the other stuff is a bit of a mystery sometimes.

Somehow, in my mind, it is too early to do any sorting or other serious work at this time of the morning, though it should not matter today, as I am the only one here. But I do plan on getting to it soon, maybe an hour from now. I'm afraid the sorting part requires my brain to function, and it is not quite all awake yet.

Maybe it will all be better after breakfast and a bath.

3 comments:

Diva's Thoughts said...

I try not to accumilate stuff. Its too easy to do. I make an effort to throw stuff away, sometime to my detriment.

Ananda girl said...

I am currently involved in a similar process. It can be exhausting to look at it. I'm trying to pack Max's stuff and move my stuff into a room that is too small for all that stuff.

dmarks said...

Stuff stuff stuff. Sometimes you drown in it.