The MacGyver Holiday Special

We're having "issues" with our mission over here.  There's very little question of that.  ISSUES.  I'm going to let Sara cover hers all by herself, if she so chooses.

As for me, there is a whole lot of Scenic Shuffle going on for The Return to the Forbidden Planet.  I worked on it Saturday, Sunday night,  Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.  Thursday I took the day off and helped Ursula with the set for The Cripple of Inishmaan at nimbus theatre, then more Planet today, more tomorrow, and load-in is all day Sunday.

The themes, for me at least, have been "Injury and Innovation."

Injury because somehow my right forearm and elbow decided that THIS was the week to pitch a fit and seem all overused.  It is amazing how much stuff my right arm just takes care of.  Some stuff it's not a big deal to relegate to my left hand.  Some stuff it is a problem.

The thing that the designer, Philip and I have laughed about a lot is that it's only very specific motions that bother this injury.  Lifting a hundred pound platform - no big deal.  Lifting a coffee cup?  Very big problem.  It is all about what I'm asking this one little crabby muscle to do, I think.  In the case of the platform, not a lot - mostly it's other muscles, so...no problem!  In the case of the coffee cup, a lot of it must be on that muscle, so...left hand, you are  on duty.  I am trying to take care of it (KT tape, ultrasound, etc. etc.) while at the same time I still have to take care of business.

As for the Innovation...

Yesterday I went and worked with Ursula and when I work with Ursula during a tech week, my MO is to take and complete the little tasks that she doesn't really want to deal with.  I often staple fabric to things, paint stuff, fix stuff.  This time there was some sanding to do.  I asked if there was a dust mask (gotta respect the lungs) and was told there was and was handed one...that had no strap.  Then while Brian was looking for one with a strap, I decided to rig up the strapless one with safety pins and a couple of pieces of tie line.  It worked and I felt like MacGyver.  But with hair that is both longer in the front and shorter in the back than his EVER was.  Plus, I'm kind of a girl, though he might be prettier than I am.  I am almost positive he is.

Today I had some basic painting to do for Forbidden Planet.  BIG pieces of flat styrofoam and plywood, so I set out the tarp in the big room and noticed for the millionth time that the big tarp had a lot of little bits of dry paint and leaves and stuff.  Since I was there by myself, I thought it was the perfect time to take care of this once and for all with...the shop vac.

When you go to vacuum a loose tarp with a shop vac, the question is:  Do I use the hose or the floor sweeper attachment?  And the answer is:  No.  In both cases, you just end up with tarp suctioned to the vacuum and not a lot of stuff gets cleaned up that way.

So I rigged up these little sled runners to the floor sweeper attachment  (made out of a broken in half paint stir stick and some skinny gaffers tape to provide an enforced gap between the hose and the tarp:

Room for the holy ghost, as it were.  It was not perfect, it's not especially durable, but it got the job done.  Again I have the hair that is shorter in the back and longer in the front and am not as pretty as Richard Dean Anderson, but getting the job done through creative use of materials at hand.  Which I love.

The other cool thing - all those pieces of 2x4 that we really should not have saved because they're kind of short to have saved...well, they're getting used in this show.  And I don't have to paint all the shortie 2x4 legs because a lot are already painted.  Vindicated in my stupidity.  Yes.

Should I be cleaning, folding, packing...something right this very minute?  Yeah, probably.  Because there are so many aspects of my life that can't be made to work with safety pins, tie line, a little tape and a broken paint stick.  But I'm so, so tired and I know there is more tomorrow.  And the day after that.  And Monday...there are also factors, but hopefully I can get back to regular on, say...Tuesday?

Am I Cleaning or am I Building or WHAT?

The only thing I cleaned so far today was the shop so it could be the rehearsal room tonight even though really...it's kind of got more the feel of a shop than a rehearsal room even when there aren't tools and carpentry and stuff going on in it.

It is not that easy to build a big set with a raked stage out of platforms and carpet padding and canvas by day and then clear everything out so it can be a nigh-unchanged rehearsal room by night.  Usually I allow about half an hour for shop-clean-up.  We spent over an hour today and hopefully it was good enough not to merit complaints.  Because sharing space isn't always easy.

Here is a picture of one of my projects today.  It is a cobbled together weirdo platform assemblage.  The exciting parts (if exciting is the right word at all) are:

1.  The two larger triangles at the top of this first picture are the ones that Scott and I built yesterday.

2.  The smaller triangles (Weirdly one is at the front of the picture and looks smaller than the large triangles with cross braces - never mind - are ones that I built for "The Woman in Black" last year.

3.  Philip asked me for 2-4x4 platforms for the middle of these pieces.  I could only bring one - the other was too dificult to extract by myself the other day.  I grabbed 2-2x2 platforms instead.  One of which has the red, black and tiny white diamonds from the floor of "Cabaret" on the underside.  On the upper side, which you can't see here, it is still the "sexy-blue" with big conversation hearts from "I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change."

4.  The fact that that platform was made of 2x6 was a source of near-endless hilarity for Philip.

Look.  It is even more evident from this view:

We might have been beyond punchy by the time I was bolting these guys together, because this over-tall platform kept cracking us up.

As did the VERY LARGE ground cloth formerly from True Love.

I don't know if all this falls under the category of "Jobs" or "Who knows what else" from the blog description, but I knew it was on its way and I knew it was going to be a distraction.  I did not know that I'd end up with a kind of a gimpy elbow or that it would push me to be unfairly snippy to a friend on Facebook.  Or that I'd sometimes think I should go back to being just a mom instead of just a mom who does all this other stuff.  But here is a pro tip for those who may be following along:

Don't try to tease me during a Build Week, unless you have been building with me. 
And then you probably get a free pass .

And for reference, the Tech Week version of this for the upcoming Tech Week is:  


Don't tease me during tech week.


Additionally, I realized we close on the new house in...two weeks?  Insanity.

Scenic Prep and a Toddler Table. This is a blog?

No, I'm pretty sure it's despair.  Things are not going that well, and I feel powerless to stop that for the most part.  

Instead of cleaning out the garage, closets, pantry or any of a large number of other things...I've been hitting the scenery HARD this weekend.  There has been a lot of moving-of-platforms, painting of exposed wood on said platforms and this lovely backdrop that had been clouds and whatnot from Suburb and now:  

It's a green screen for magic video stuff.  It's very like my race shirts!  Or the aliens in Buzz Light Year.  Don't you think?  Big, BIG thanks to Dorian and Sadie who also painted a TON on Saturday.  I...there are no words to express how much I appreciate other people painting.

Meanwhile at home, I was facing THIS.  It's a small, adorable toddler table.  My children enjoyed it very much...when they were toddlers and even first graders.  Now we use it for collecing paper and things and stuff and more things.  

Yes.  After working a long day of scenic preparing...I worked on it until it got to the point of having just computer programs, computers and a box of mints on it and a pair of green binoculars under it.  Those binoculars are going in the donation bag SOON, I believe.  Shockingly, this did not even take that long.

Sunday, there was a lot more scenery.  And stuff.  And I got to scale a 7 foot tall stack of platforms.  I tell ya, it is a good thing I can climb!  And then big thanks also to Scott for helping me build triangle platforms.  Because building those alone would have been nigh impossible, I'm here to say.

So the despair...is mitigated by the fact that I'm not working on everything alone AND that at least as far as the house goes, I am starting to see the areas I have tackled and vanquished begin to gain some ground on the areas that are still making me feel overwhelmed and sometimes I even feel like I really can do this.

And the blog...is ONE view away from a thousand page views.  This is simultaneously cool and a little unnerving, maybe. 

Reading what Corinna has written recently, I think we are in a similar state.  It's not exactly despair, but it is frustration and exhaustion and what we were taught in my college sociology class to call "role strain." 

Doing this at this time of year (not only winter but the holiday season) is blatantly insane.  And yet here we are. 

One way this manifests is stupid fights.  And this week my husband and I had a HUGE fight.  About money and time and how on earth we can pay for all the improvements for this house and Christmas and boots for Alex, etc.  Okay, really, it was more about me picking up a shift without clearing the night (it's an overnight shift) with Austin first.  But still.  It is hard to be here and be a wife and mom and work on the house while also being at Mayo and taking care of patients and earning money.  Not to mention my unfortunately human need for sleep.

But... onward we go.  And I did not kill Austin, nor did I kill the realtors who came over on Tuesday and stressed me out all over again.  See, I am a good person; I have resisted the temptation to commit murder multiple times this week!

In this spirit (of not-killing anyone), I offer some more photographs from our recent house cleaning adventures.

First, another fabulous cat picture.  We often have dishes in our sink, so Apollo doesn't see it completely clean very often.  His reaction to the amazingly spotless sink was to climb right in, stick his front left arm all the way down the drain (which does have a garbage disposal in it, causing me to have a vision of that terrible scene from Stephen King's The Dead Zone), paw at the side for a few minutes, and then curl up in it.  I guess he approved?

Next, I have to share a photograph of something I found buried in my office closet; Japanese homework.  Yes, I studied Japanese once upon a time.  In late 1997.  And no, apparently I never threw away any of my homework from that era.  I have now recycled all of it (keeping only the hard cover Japanese language textbook that I long ago shelved with my collection of language books and a "kanji a day" calendar that Austin gave me for Christmas that year).  But here is what my 1997-era Japanese handwriting looked like:

Yeah, that's right; my handwriting sucks in hiragana, katakana, and kanji as well as in the familiar English (?) alphabet we use.

Finally, my ten year old daughter, Julia, loves to sort things.  I have a huge collection of K-Cups, and sometimes I let her pull them all out and reorganize them.  I let her do that the other day, and was terrified by the number of cups of coffee I should drink before I buy more K-Cups.

True confession: I am a K-Cup hoarder as well as a book hoarder.  Sigh.

Hallway Surfaces and other Adventures

It's been a busy day.  I did get my hair fixed up this morning.  No matter what Megan does bleach and dye-wise, the hair that had been dark/purple is determined to stay a sort of strawberry blonde color.  So there's that, and I can live with it until it grows out or I get sick of this blonde thing and go back to something dark and dramatic. 

After that I tackled THIS monstrosity of a surface  (actually, this picture was taken mid process when the pile was somewhat beaten down already.  There were clothes and a few other things as well, but you get the idea.) As I worked, I pondered why it is that every single surface keeps ending up with STUFF piled on it:

Later in the afternoon, I took Sick-Cat Felicia to the Special Vet in Eden Prairie.  Flying Cloud Drive sounds so whimsical and...exciting or something?  It's not really.  But the Blue Pearl vets are very nice vets and Felicia is continuing to have liver problems etc. etc.

Andrew kindly got very good pizza for dinner and I, through Sara's goading, pulled myself out of my funk enough to Finish Hallway Surface #1:

And start on hallway Surface #2:

Here is an actual quote from my IM with Sara earlier regarding a thing found in this collection:

• 

  20:46
  

  Corinna
  

  Seriously, do I never throw anything away? There was a magnet with Justin's teacher's contact info at a school that has been closed for 2.5 years.
  
• 

  20:57
  

  Sara 
  

  
  

  That is amazing!
• 

  20:58
  

  Corinna
  

  
  

  In a mortifying way.

Better now:

And at Sara's request, here is a picture of the money I have found in the house during my clean-out:

It's about $22 US and will be put toward the Eggnog 2012/13 Fund.  I have since transferred it to one of the kids' counting-change-banks and added some more found change from Hallway Surface #2 and (premptively) My Pocket #1.

Despair and Donations

Yesterday was for despair, well, and Thanksgiving, and finishing scrubbing out the blackened pot with the scrubby thing, but yes, in the end, despair.

Today is maybe still for despair, but we have to keep going somehow, don't we?  And it's a donation day.  I've been looking forward to this for a while now:

This is what 18 donation bags on my porch looks like.  Bringing my total number of Bags of Stuff Donated to...37 since we began this little adventure.  That does not include the stuff I have given to friends.

The problem is, no matter how much stuff I manage to sort into bags and put on my porch to be taken away by charities, it feels like I'm not making significant enough progress that I could possibly be done by mid-December.

Add to that several other responsibilities, missed deadlines, illness and other...trouble and the despair wants to take over and settle down for a nice long visit.  Which does nothing toward getting any of the stuff done that needs to be done, or out that needs to be out or moved that needs to be moved, making the sick cat healthy, etc. etc.

It's not that my problems are worse than anyone else's.  It's not that they aren't the much maligned "first world problems."  But even if they are awesome problems to have...sometimes they are still problems, you know?  And sometimes they might still weigh on a person a little heavily.  

There is also icy snow out there this morning.  I excavated the shovel.  And on we go.

Some Tips.

I spent the day today cooking a pre-Thanksgiving dinner and trying to scramble things for the upcoming production of Return to the Forbidden Planet, so I didn't get a lot of Clean-Out stuff done.  I do already have 15 donation bags for the pick-up on Friday.  Which may be twice as many as I said I'd have.  And I do look at the remaining "trouble zones" in the house (with the exception of the garage...ack) as being a lot more manageable than I did when I started.  I've gotten some of the most daunting things out of the way, thank goodness.

So here are some tips from this week.

Tip 1:

This comes from Brian Johnsen:  employee, friend.  His wife Jenny told me that his wisdom is that if you haven't touched something in 6 months, move it on out of your house.  I think there may be an exception for seasonal clothes.  This is smart in a lot of ways.  I also don't know that I could do it - probably 75% of the stuff in my house falls under that category.  Which may be why I really *should* do it.

Tip 2:

If you cook pudding and forget about it and the bottom of the beautiful stainless steel pain gets a thick, black crust on it...the thing you want for that is the Scotch Brite Stainless Steel scrubbing puff things.  It's not a fast process, but it really does get that black stuff off.

Tip 3:  

Fortitude.  Things in all quadrants may look like a disaster.  It is important not to fall over and give up.



That's all I've got.

The Headboard that Ate the Public Library?

This has been a project for a couple of days now.  It's...a magnificent headboard gone totally, horrifically wrong.  There is a green sand bucket, for goodness sake.

I worked left to right and realized a few things as I went:

I am getting good at quickly recognizing things that have no functional place in my current life, which doesn't necessarily make them easy to get rid of.  That's a metaphor.

We have a dust problem.  The problem is that we don't have anyone come and dust for us.

It's true that you know you have an issue when your best weapon against dust is the vacuum.  Partway through, I was inspired to take a picture to show just how long it had been since I had dared look up there  It's...practically its own continent.  Now, before you judge....well, I don't really have anything.  Go ahead and judge.  That's a freakish lot of dust.

This headboard has a secret compartment.  Do you want to know what I found in there?  One earring,  a cap from a needle used for giving a cat subcutaneous fluids (oh, 6 years ago!!), and 5 books.  The titles:  Weight Watchers Dining Out Companion, Nonviolent Communication Workbook, New Clues to Harry Potter Book 5,  Growing Up Attachment Parenting: From Kindergarten to College, and Snarf Attack:  Underfoodle and the Secret of Life.  Apparently we have no clue what a secret compartment is for.  Or HAD no clue way back when we were filling up that secret compartment with really random books.

And check it out - the finished headboard.  It really is VERY nice.  If it doesn't end up full to bursting with...you know...STUFF.  I went through both cabinets, and all the drawers, too.  The room isn't finished, but this was a big depressing thing that now is practically ready to pack and move.  Oh, and good news:  none of the books I found was actually a library book.  That is a good thing, my friends.

Next Project!

We Now Return To Your Regularly Scheduled Clean-Out

Life has continued on at its usual break-neck pace.  There's been a lot of zipping around with kids, grocery shopping, show prep, etc. etc.  Super fascinating.

I've been working slowly and sporadically on getting the clothes under control.  I've got both boys pretty well settled and their dressers full of only clothes that fit them.

For myself, I realize that I am the problem.  I could have 3 separate dressers AND a closet.  One for regular clothes, one for workout/running clothes and a third for paint/construction clothes and the closet for those times I have to turn into a "fancy lady."  I'm not sure what the solution to THAT is except to turn all my regular and workout clothes into paint clothes and just be OK with paint on my clothes?

While I ponder THAT issue a while longer, I'm going to escort some children's books on out of the house.

I'm starting with books that neither I nor the children have any real affection for and/or interest in.  Weirdly, I feel compelled to keep the books I read the most times.  Logically this probably makes no sense.

Here is bookshelf #1.  It is ostensibly the bookshelf belonging to the younger of my two sons.  It is full to overflowing with a lot of random books for a wide variety of ages.

I removed 3 paper bags reasonably full of books we did not even like and ended up with this:

FACT:  This is probably still more than half full of books we don't really need to keep, but I feel like this is not a bad start for a person who, historically speaking, has only ever brought books INTO the house.

The Other Five Paragraph Backstory...which is actually not Five Paragraphs.

Now that Sara has thrown down the Backstory Gauntlet of Doom...I feel I must respond in kind.

Why Move at All?
We have been considering a move to St. Paul for several years now, for several reasons.  It's never really gone anywhere because we've been complacent, the location of our current house is convenient moving is a lot of work AND...we've never found the right house.  At all. Some of the reasons we might want to move to St. Paul:

1.  The kids are both in school in St. Paul, and while I enjoy driving them to and from each day, I do not enjoy driving them to and from on 35E in rush hour each day.

2. St. Paul is Cool.  Tyler Olsen says so.   www.stpauliscool.com.  Eagan is cool too, but after 15 years or so in the suburbs, we feel like it's time to try a different flavor of coolness.

3.  Our current house, lovely as it is...Andrew keeps thinking is not really configured well for us.  2 bedrooms and a comic room downstairs, master bedroom upstairs, and we have all ended up in the wrong places.  I think we could rejigger and make it work, but, well, we never do.  It has always been about location first, kitchen second.  When the boys were at Tesseract, life was easy, but NEVER have we lived in a house that aligned with our idea of a "dream home."  Andrew has always wanted a brick house.  I have always wanted a nice front porch.  We've had siding and stucco and glorified front stoops, and I really can't complain as our homes have been very nice, but very little brick, very little porch.

4.  Lovely as our house is, much as there are many things I adore about it, Andrew is an Army brat, and much as he likes the concept of settling in and putting down roots, in reality, every so often he seems to get the undeniable itch to move houses, if not states, and we are definitely past due.

5.  Every winter, the Prius ends up in the snowbank at the bottom of the hill at least once.  I can't explain it, but I always have to dig it out.  There is a glacier in our front yard.  The driveway is very slope-y.  I embrace the challenge but I could also live without it.

Now up to this point, the benefits of moving did not really outweigh the pain-in-the-assiness of moving, and I figured we'd just ride out the joys of the commute, the big boxiness of the shopping, the lack of bricks and porches.  No big.  Occasionally we look at cool houses in St. Paul online, but mostly it doesn't make practical sense.

Enter Scott, Lucy and Emma.

All through our time in Minnesota, we have envied our friends who have extensive extended family in the area.  It's tough to juggle kids, work, home, dog, and a theater company with just two adults and no built-in sitters.  We've made it work, but there's often a good bit of scrambling, missing out on meetings, school events, etc. etc.  We've always said to directors "You get ONE of us for a given show."  And mostly it has worked.  But in the past year with Andrew as president and me, well, picking up some of the production slack at Chameleon and elsewhere, we have had to do even more compromising and juggling and asking the kids to take care of their own selves in order to make things work.

Our friend Scott has two daughters, now age 15 and 13.  He also has no extended family in the area, but the thing about working together in theater is that communities and friendships form quickly.  Every tech week is a bit of a crucible and at the end of it, either you never want to see each other again, or you're family.  Obviously we came down on the "Family" side.  In the past six months, Scott has gone from being a divorced dad with shared custody of his two daughters to being a full time single dad, after the girls' mom suddenly and unexpectedly died this past spring.

Over the course of the summer, we spent a lot time with the girls, even having them come out and stay with us for 2 weeks in Michigan while Scott was in the final weeks of production for "Steel Kiss" at the Minnesota Fringe Festival (and beyond), and we have been helping each other out with picking up and dropping off kids, errands, and some shared cooking, but since they are in Little Canada and we are in Eagan, it's sometimes not as easy as we'd like to be of assistance to each other.

Scott and the girls have been getting by in their 2 bedroom condo, but could use a little more room, now they are all living there full time.  At one point I said "Well, in a way, it's too bad we didn't buy that crazy old house on Summit last year, cause we'd have room for EVERYONE in a big house like that!"  Which got Andrew looking at big houses in St. Paul again.  And he found one that has 7 bedrooms, brick exterior, big front porch, fenced in yard, a small wood shop, an apartment on the 3rd floor, as well as ample garage space for all of our car and construction needs.  And the price was right, so we decided to go ahead and go for it.

Here we go!

We are looking forward to the flexibility of having 3 adults in the house to juggle time at home, pick-ups, drop offs and other challenges as we meet them.  Ultimately, the one really good reason that pushes it over the top and makes it all worth the trouble of cleaning out and moving:  Support.  Support and collaboration for the adults, support and additional adults as resources for the kids, and more kids for the kids to be kids with.  We'll also get space for a scene-type shop, a non-freeway route to the boys' school, bricks and a big front porch.  Not a bad deal overall, right?

Five Paragraph Backstory

Like many people, my friend Todd was surprised to hear that we were planning to move, and he wanted to know when I was going to email him with more information.  Other friends have also asked for the "backstory," so here I offer the five paragraph essay* that I wrote to Todd, as an explanation:

++++

While we have enjoyed living in this house, and especially enjoyed the
quiet location in front of a cemetery, it is time for us to move out.
This house has several issues that are becoming serious problems; our
children need separate rooms, I hate the kitchen, and we are just
outgrowing it.  Allow me to explain.

One of the major problems with this house is that our kids are still
sharing a room.  They are a 14 year old boy and a 10 year old girl.
While it doesn't bother them, it's past time to separate them.  It
would be possible to move Alex into the downstairs room I use as my
office, but then I don't have any space for myself (which I do need)
and I also don't have any space for the vast amount of crap we store
in that space.

Another problem with this house is that I hate the kitchen.  It isn't
actually terrible (despite apparently being scientifically designed to
be difficult to work in) until someone else is in the kitchen with me.
 I get really claustrophobic and annoyed in it if there is anyone else
in it, and I actually fear I will hurt someone at some point if I have
to keep working in there.  It is especially bad if Austin or Julia
comes up and wants to cuddle with me in the kitchen.  I can't stand
it.  I've never been claustrophobic in my life but this kitchen makes
me feel panicky and bitchy.  (I mean I always feel bitchy but the
panic part really adds something!)

A more general reason is this: we are outgrowing this house.  It's a
nice house but we have a lot of interests and *things* that go with
those interests.  We are running out of places to put bookshelves.  I
need more space for yarn.  I can't acquire any more kitchen
implements, regardless of how useful they might be.  It's just not
enough space for all of our stuff - despite my fixation with
decluttering and tossing things out or giving them away.  It's time to
go.

We can't stay in this house forever and it is now time to move on.
The kids need separate rooms, I can't stand this kitchen, and we just
have too much stuff at this point in time.  The efforts to sell this
house continue and hopefully we will be moving early in 2013.

++++

*The five paragraph essay thing is an inside joke with those of us who went through the Honors Social Studies program in Hastings in the late 1980s (as Todd and I both did, albeit in different years).  We had an American history teacher named Mr. Hartman who had us write five paragraph essays in this exact form every Friday, all year.  It eventually became clear to me that Mr. Hartman even conducted his class in five paragraph essay form; we always did three things and he always told us what we were going to do (down to the minute) at the beginning of class and talked about what we had done as we all filed out together to go to Mr. Schultz's Honors English class. 

So yeah, I can still crank one of those essays out in about twenty minutes.  Scary.

I feel compelled to point out that the kitchen isn't really all that bad and it's better than a lot of other kitchens that are out there.  It's just not possible to remodel it easily.  I never thought I would be so bothered by only having one exit out of a room into the rest of the house but it makes me feel trapped and panicky.  Hopefully it will be the perfect kitchen for someone else.

The Donation Zone.

The good thing is, I keep moving things out of here.  The bad thing is...there is so much more to do.  I know that packing and moving is a big undertaking but I am not even close to ready to think about that yet.

The years of accumulation.  It's like a long, arduous visit to the dentist after a 20 year hiatus.  Well, kinda.

I was in and out of the house all day today, but even so, I managed to chip away at a bit of the tartar of life:

I sorted through Justin's drawers and realized:
The answer to the question of how many non-uniform clothes Justin actually needs is probably...zero.
And yet he has the wardrobe of a kid whose older brother went to a school that not only did not require a uniform but also had multiple opportunities for acquiring school-themed t-shirts.

This also occurred to me today:  Getting rid of stuff is kind of addictive.
I mean, it's not necessarily easy at first, but after a while, I get to be on a roll, and I think "oh, I'll just start one more donation bag!"  And the larger a percentage of stuff seems like something I could do without.

It is great to be able to just donate the clothes that are too small for any child in the house.  Fantastic, really.  They aren't going back there!  No question!

Today's great find:
QUALITY Velcro in the shape of frogs.  From EPCOT, back when they had a show about Velcro in Innoventions.  True Story.

It was all bound up with a cool scarf and at first my instinct was to throw it out but then I realized...this is GREAT velcro and of a quality that you can't just walk into Michael's and BUY.  So...I extricated it and put it in a baggie (to prevent further entanglements) and put it with the sewing things.

I actually have a "Donation Zone" in my home.  There's a section of the "office" where I put the bags that are ready to go away.  I sent away 9 bags this morning.  I have 5 new bags this evening.  Next pickup is over a week away.  Although I always have the option of dropping things off at Goodwill myself.

This Week's Donation...

This week's donation is to The Courage Center:

9 bags.  7 of clothes, 2 of toys.

Not too bad.   I took a picture, but it just looks like bags of clothes and stuff.  And there is a little snow.  I actually found that I had two more bags after I took this.  Probably not worth the trouble of posting, but here it is anyhow:

And I got one dresser to the point that this morning I was able to say this to one child:

"Your clothes, if you need them, are all in your dresser.  Except these which I wasn't sure if you still wanted.  Do you still want them?"

Hey, that's not bad progress for a weekend as jam-packed with adventure and obligation as this one was!

There are a few more dressers to go and then:  Books, I've got my eye on you.

Still Slogging

Somehow all manner of other aspects of life have taken over the past few days.

Saturday was a beautiful day that would have been perfect for cleaning out the garage, except we had a bunch of other stuff that we did instead of that.

Today was also busy with alternate plans.

I still managed to spend some time this evening on the clothing situation, mostly in preparation for tomorrow's "donation pickup" appointment.

I managed to sort through the last half of the laundry baskets (I have a lot of laundry baskets) and now I have a couch covered in piles of clean clothes.  Which will do me no good if I can't figure out where to put them before they fall over/become covered in cat fur/get subsumed by more clothes.

Taking the next step, I decided that Bailey's dresser would be the least odious place to start.  And most possible since through some sort of inept logistical decision making, it was the only dresser not located in a room where people are sleeping.

So...I am maybe not going to go into this whole thing.  But I manage to sort out the stuff he is wearing from the stuff which, for whatever reason, he is not.  Mostly.  And got his laundry into the drawers in a somewhat functional way again.  I hope.

I also have multiple bags of clothes for the donation tomorrow.

It is clear from the clothing being piled on the couch that the main clothing problem is me.  Although Andrew might have some stacks of pants as well.

He does persist in sorting through the multitude of papers that had been subsuming a considerable quantity of counter space in the kitchen.  Go Andrew!

I also realized that today, by posting the link to this blog, I have revealed myself to be person who does not have her stuff together, who, in fact, probably should not be trusted to ever buy anything again.  The good news is, as Sara points out, I haven't managed to have a cat pass away unnoticed amid the clutter.  Things could be worse.

First Showing Prep And BOOKS

We are up against quite a deadline here, so fewer photographs are being taken than I would like... but the blog must go on!

We had our first showing yesterday morning, despite the fact that many walls need to be painted, many items still need to be sorted and tossed or recycled or donated, and carpet needs to be replaced downstairs.  The more we clean the more I find more places where dirt is lodged.  I just looked at the door to the deck, for example.  I had wanted to wipe it down and then maybe re-paint it at some point.  I didn't realize how grimy and disgusting the lower edge of the window is.  Who ever looks at that?  Well, I did yesterday.  It is still grimy.  There wasn't time to fix that... yet.

On the other hand, we have made an insane amount of progress, much of it due to Austin.  I'm not bad at packing, cleaning, and organizing but he is amazing at it.  Not to mention that he worked two 19 hour days of painting and cleaning... so much so that I was a little worried on Friday night that he had physically harmed himself by pushing himself so far.  (Note: the guy runs marathons sometimes, but he still needs sleep.  Thankfully he got some sleep this weekend and now seems fine.)

So.  Some painting has happened.  Our front entrance has new flooring.  The kid's bathroom has been almost totally re-done (that was in the works before we made an offer on a house, though).  And we have put a LOT of books into storage.

I love books.  Austin loves books.  Alex loves books.  Julia loves books.  I'm pretty sure that even our cat, Apollo, loves books.  We have put perhaps a third of our collection into storage so far.  This first photo is of a bookcase that is still standing, but which Austin switched out some of the less-used books and magazines.  Apollo enjoyed checking out the temporary empty space.  Also note the flurry of random books and papers in the foreground; those were put away in a box for the showing.

The other photograph I want to share is of the brick and board bookcase that housed our fiction books.  Austin dismantled it, packed the books and took all of the books and materials to storage.  Now he's painting the dingy wall a beautiful cream color and we are hoping to re-carpet the entire area.  Hopefully I can share some "after" photos in the near future.

And... that's it for now.  More soon, possibly related to packing and moving more books.  We have a lot of books...

A Secret and Some Clothes

A Cool Secret:  I saw the R-C house today and...They appear to have WON the challenge.  Sara maintains that there is a great deal more to do, but it is an incredible transformation they have accomplished this week, along with their storage unit and many, many hours of work, I'm sure.

As for me, I am grappling with clothes right now.  How many clothes are enough?  How many clothes do I have in this house that fit NOBODY?  How am I going to resolve my 8 (now 4) laundry baskets, dresser drawers, etc. etc.

I don't have an answer, but I do know that I should have been cleaning out my garage on this perfectly warm November afternoon instead of eating cheese in Sara's lovely, clean basement.  Ah well.

The Best Part

I feel like I'm treading water, not getting anywhere.  Certainly not moving very fast even with the current.

Today I got to the point where I decided I HAD to do something about the clothing situation.  Sara's post on laundry + Scott talking to Lucy about putting away clothes and how there was room in the drawers because they had cleaned them out + 8 baskets of clothes (at least!) in the bedroom...

So I moved the baskets of clothes out to the living room.  It's not anything but shuffling, but...I need to go through them.  I need to get things out of drawers.  It's a big project and this is step 1.

In the process, I did find 2 bags of donatable clothes, 1 bag of pants with holes all in the same knee and 1 bag of yellow stuffed animals.  A big elephant, a Pluto and a Pikachu.

And there were bags.  Bags that had not been unpacked from trips.  There was a fastpass for Space Mountain in 2006.  Needless to say, we missed the freaking window on that one!

Then I started going through those bags.  From the trips.  My medals from 2009 - my first year of racing and I got the first Coast-to-Coast medal.  It came off its ribbon, but I fixed it.

There were postcards from Chameleon shows in 2009 - Cabaret and Suburb: The Musical.

And there was this little gem.  Which has been missing for, obviously, years:

And which Justin has been pining for lately.  He'll be excited in the morning, for sure.




I also found a little notebook.  I had clearly taken some notes on a class or seminar or something. 

Among other things, it included this wisdom:

What are the conditions that foster respect?
3 things to boost self-esteem

not IQ, not location, not education, not ncome.

3 things

1.  Unconditional Love.
2.  Reachable expectations
(less permissive environment, non-negotiable rules, not too many)
3.  Respetful & Democratic Environment

(Listen - what kids want more of)

Presence is critical.

I still haven't contended with those baskets of clothes and don't have room in the drawers for them anyway, but...I'll get there.

My Office, The Place Where Stuff Goes to Die

Things I have found while clearing out my office:

A Gymboree receipt from 2005
Fisher Price Little People brochure (my kids are 10 and 15 and all the Little People have long since left our home)
About 25 Disney World brochures from Epcot, Typhoon Lagoon, etc., along with schedules from dates in 2001 and 2006 (useful)
Crinoline for my wedding dress (extra useful)
Lots of information about vaccines from my previous job as a Mayo vaccination nurse (recycled most of it)
A piece of paper that I got in a Kaplan class in 2010 that helped me pass the NCLEX-RN (keeping that and copying it for the people I work with who are currently in nursing school)
Approximately ten zillion photographs of various people from various eras (no time to organize this all now!)
A half-used beeswax Christmas ornament kit that I bought from Chinaberry at least eight years ago
At least thirty jigsaw puzzles
A basket that my Mother-In-Law, Eleanor, gave me several years ago.  It is meant to be decorative but must be kept away from the cat.  Also it is full of yarn.
A LOT of yarn from various projects that I have finished.  More yarn from projects that are half-completed.  More yarn from projects I haven't started.
More cross stitch patterns than I could use in fifty lifetimes (not that I won't try)
Random puzzle pieces
Random bits of toys from toys that are long gone
Random game pieces from games that are long gone
An exercise DVD Corinna lent me


What is scary is that there is still so much left in here to be sorted and packed or donated or tossed or recycled.

I need to do better than this at the next house, that is for sure.  This place is like entropy on steroids...

Some days.

Some days it seems like I am a clutter-reducing machine.  I have focus, I have drive, I have faith it will all get done.

Some days...it feels like it's all on me and there is no hope.

Some days all I can do is tread water and prevent too much backsliding.

Today is one of those days....but not the first one.

I did get Andrew to start attacking the Wall-O-Paper.  He's made better progress on it than I would have, I think, and has already filled at least one bag of recycling.

Magazines must all go.

I have a love/hate relationship with paper bags.

I just want to get rid of everything, until I start going through it and then I'm not sure what to get rid of and what to keep.

I unpacked the rest of the groceries and cleaned off the counter.  There was a "natural disaster" and/or "biohazard" from some tomatoes.  Why?  Because apparently I can't even manage to keep tomatoes from rotting on my counter.  I need a little dose of hope.

Corinna

Closet Decluttering Funtimes

It is a little distressing how fast Corinna is outpacing me already, blogging-wise.  But I've been busy the last two days, signing papers to buy a new house (yes, for real) and also participating in Halloween hijinx.  And then today I went to one of the local elementary schools and subbed in the nurse's office.

But now, back to my closet, because I know you have been dying to see pictures of the horror, the horror that it was.

The closet had a LOT of stuff in it.  Shoes all over the floor of it, plus two bags of toys I'm gathering up to donate, a bag of knitting projects, and all kinds of other random items:

The shelves held a huge mishmash of sweaters and clothing - mostly my husband's, because I'm too short to reach!

I had piles of sweaters, pajamas, and exercise clothing in a mishmash on the side shelving, topped by a sloppy pile of handmade baby blankets.  (Note: my babies are now 10 and 14 years old).

I cleared out a bunch of stuff and bagged it up to donate to Epilepsy Foundation or Goodwill, and pulled everything off the shelves and sorted it.  Some things needed to be washed and many things needed to be re-folded.  The baby blankets are now packed away in a box to go into storage for a while.

Meanwhile, Austin (my husband) was also inspired and he cleared out a LOT of clothing and put them into a bag to be donated later.  He also tackled those upper shelves that I can't reach, sorting and re-folding everything.

Here's a view of his side of the closet:

Here is what my side of the closet looks like now:

And... now it's finally possible to walk into the closet again.  Weird.  But I like it.

Next up: working on the disaster area that I call my office.