Friday's deadline is almost here

Okay, so I said that I should clean and do a bunch of things before Friday. Well, as you might guess, not much in the way of cleaning has been done. But I have checked other major things off of my list. My annual visit to the clinic is done (though I should probably do the whole cholesterol testing thing later), and my mammogram is done, and yesterday I got the car inspected. It would be nice to also get the oil change taken care of, but I'm not sure that I have the money left for it.

I need to keep some money, just in case I get jury duty. In fact, if they just have me sitting in a waiting room for two weeks, I'll have to spend about a hundred dollars just on parking fees. And then there's lunch, breakfast if I have to leave really early, and dinner if I have to stay really late.

And then there is always the possibility that I might actually have to be on a real jury instead of just going through the motions of not getting picked.

Or I might spend the next two weeks making phone calls and finding out that I don't have to go in at all.

There is just no way to know. I'm trying to be prepared either way.

Anyway, back to the cleaning. I had it in my head that I should start with the back room, that it wouldn't take long, that there wasn't that much to do since I had done most of the work back in October. But it is totally messed up again. I now have more than nine boxes of yarn and a box of finished scarves, plus a few more scarves that are almost finished.

Let me explain what I mean by a box of yarn. These boxes are the plastic totes that range in size between fifteen and twenty gallons. I picked out one of the boxes and counted twenty-two skeins of regular four-ply acrylic yarn, new, still with the wrapper. I figure that a few of these were colors that I bought by mistake and decided that it wasn't worth the effort of returning them to the store (since they were probably bought on sale and were a good deal anyway), or else I found them on clearance or at a thrift store, and so they were about a dollar a skein or less. So at an average of a dollar a skein, the box cost me about twenty-two dollars. If I went out and bought the yarn now, at about two-fifty a skein, the box is worth about fifty-five dollars. I figure that is about an average box, with some of the yarn costing me more than a dollar, some of the yarn costing less than a dollar, some of the skeins being bought for about what they are worth, most being bought at a major discount, a few of the skeins are larger, and some of the skeins are smaller (more skeins in a box than the twenty-two I counted). It would take some figuring to really remember what I paid and what the yarn would cost if I wanted some like it, but I think twenty-two dollars and fifty-five dollars are good amounts to work with without doing all of that, and that works out to I spent just under two hundred dollars on the yarn, and new yarn would cost about five hundred.

So that is a lot of valuable yarn, and I don't want to get rid of it.

Okay, I don't really seem to want to get rid of anything. But I especially don't want to get rid of the yarn. I just want to get it organized so that I might actually use it.

Anyway, there's a lot of taking things out of one box and putting them in another, and then sometimes deciding that I don't like that any better and putting things back the way they were before.

Maybe I should start labeling things as to what should be done with them if I suddenly get hit by a bus and die. The yarn should be divided between M and B and other B. The scarves should be divided between K and Dmarks. If one of the lost Dr. Who scarves is found, TB should get it (after my husband and Dmarks get theirs). Costumes should go to K (except one that should go to Dmarks, even though it is too small for him to wear). Anything Land of the Lost should go to Dmarks, except for the DVDs and duplicate items should go to my brother. Any artwork not promised to someone else, my brother should get first refusal. Same with the books. K gets first refusal on Halloween stuff. And K gets first refusal on other craft supplies, except for soap and candles, which should go to G. S should get back some things that he gave me for Christmas, that I never got to use, and give them to someone else who could use them. The rest to whoever wants it.

Then there are other things that I should put in boxes that say, probably no one will want this, donate to Goodwill. I can't seem to do that myself now, but I wouldn't want to die and have anyone thinking those things were important to me and that someone needs to preserve them.

I should get back to work moving stuff back and forth between boxes. I still need to make room for the six more boxes in the living room.