![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shivverSpring just started (not that you can tell here in the Pacific Northwest -- the weather is as cold and rainy as it always is from October through May), so it's time for spring cleaning! Except that's what I've been doing for the past few months anyway. Part of this semi-retirement gig I have going on was the promise of trying to clean up the house, and as I've noted recently, I've been focusing more on that in the last couple of months.
Not that that's all I've been doing. I've been also devoting some amount of time to music and writing, as well as to learning Japanese (through Duolingo, though I'm getting more and more disenchanted with that app, but I'll talk about that in a different post, maybe). My husband is also trying to get me to play more computer games, saying that the point of me not working is to let me relax and have fun, not just work on different stuff all the time. But there's a substantial part of me that feels really bad that he's working and I'm not, and I don't feel good about having fun when he can't. Also, my gaming computer is in the room where he works, and I'm not comfortable lurking in there when he's in a meeting, which is much of his day. So at least I have that excuse. (The computer I'm on right now is capable of playing my games, but it's a not-particularly-powerful laptop, so performance is crap, and its GPU fan sounds like a jet airplane any time I start up anything that uses at least 1% of the graphics card.)
Anyway...
"Cleaning house" for us is a far larger task than you might expect. This house is a MESS. We're two essentially lazy people, living in this house for over twenty-five years now, who never had kids and never intended to have kids (and thus didn't need to keep the house clean for other people and had a good amount of disposable income), and who don't do activities with friends that involve inviting them over to their house. What does this result in? Huge piles of stuff.
We think we've matured a bit over the last three decades, in that we're kind of appalled at the choices we've made over the years and we take a lot more care now about what we really want to buy and what we can do without. We're also a lot more careful how we handle everyday items, such as making sure that things we take out get put away again (well, at least most of the time). But that still leaves twenty-five years of crap lying around.
So that's been my general task. We chose a particular room to clear out first and I've been concentrating on that, though I have been deviating for smaller tasks and for things that I personally care about. For example, I took a day to clear off my dresser: remove all the things that have strayed onto it, remove and clean all the things that are going to stay up there (such as my Big Chief Studios TARDIS and my Lego ship-in-a-bottle [holy crap, this thing is expensive now; it was only about $60 when I got it]), and wash the runner. It's all back and looking pretty.
Another thing I've done is sorted through clothes and donated gobs of it. For years now, I've been doing laundry and dumping it in that room, and we've been picking from the pile. You know how that goes: you only use the things that are on the top of the pile. Well, at least he's only using the things on the top of the pile; I have a dresser at least, but it's been really full for quite a while, so I've gotten down to only using what's in two of the drawers.
Him, well, he only digs so far down, so eventually, a shirt gets worn out, so he throws it away and says that he needs more shirts, and I get him a few. Well, now, I've gotten through the entire pile and omg he has so much clothing!! I mean, that only makes sense, right? He throws away one shirt and gains three more. Duh. So, I got all of his clothing out of the pile, washed and sorted it, then asked him to go through it and identify what can be donated and which small pile he wants to use currently. Then I boxed up the rest and put it in the garage for when he needs new clothes in the future. Two big bins of clothing.
I'm not much better, mind you. I've gone through my dresser, as well as my stuff that was in the general pile, and donated piles of that stuff, too, and I'm realizing I need to do it again. You see, back in around 2012 or so, I used to hang out with this friend of mine (my only good friend here, really, and we've lost touch since), and she took it upon herself to teach me how to dress, because I have neither fashion sense nor interest. We used to go to Goodwill every couple of months and try on stuff, and she'd show me how to coordinate things, and I'd buy the clothing that looked good. But you guessed it - I never really wore it. Sure, this thing looked good when she was telling me what to wear it with, but I never remembered what it was on my own, and I have no idea if it looks good with any of the other stuff I have.
So that's what my dresser was stuffed with - tons of clothing that I'd never wear. That was two full bags of stuff sent back to Goodwill, and I'm realizing now that I wasn't harsh enough on it. But I have other things that I need to concentrate on first.
But that wasn't really what I had intended to talk about in this post. Funny how that happens, you start with one goal and totally branch off into other goals. Because that's what I'm finding with this project of cleaning the house.
I started with the one room, and it's actually coming along well. The clothes are cleared out, and there's actual floor space now. There'll be more when I finally disassemble and dispose of the world's most uncomfortable couch™. Seriously. The couch was designed to be easily assembled/disassembled, probably for use in a college dorm room, and had been in the basement of my husband's mother's house, where the kids would play video games and such. When we moved out here, she insisted that we take it (along with a couple of other bits of questionable furniture, such as a table made of wood slats spaced far apart, meaning that you can't actually put anything other than magazines on it because it'll just tip over or fall through -- prime example of an object that the designer didn't actually use). Even when it was in good condition, it was not comfortable -- my butt and back would hurt after sitting in it for an hour, and that was when I was in my twenties, when a little achiness didn't matter at all. So, nearly thirty years later, it is finally getting thrown out (next week, to be exact).
But I digress (again)...
The problem is that I'm working on this one room, and I'm like, "Where should I put this? Well, (this place) would be perfect, but that needs to be cleaned out before I can put it there, so..." and I go off to work on that. Last week, I diverted to clean out the hall closet and mostly succeeded, but it's got a couple of things that can't be dealt with quite yet. This week, I diverted to cleaning out a part of another room to set up some bins, but that's exploded now into cleaning up some piles in there as well as piles in another room.
The most frustrating thing is that none of thes projects ever actually finish. I can't finish the hall closet for reasons. The new room I'm working on, I can only proceed so far at this point. I'd like to actually finish something. :P
One thing good that's coming out of all this cleaning and my not needing to spend eight hours a day at a job is that I'm coming up with some great lifehack ideas and implementing them. For example, my husband uses a CPAP machine when he sleeps, and when he gets up, he leaves the mask and hose part on the bed. This means that any time either of us uses the bed in any way, the first thing we have to do is locate the mask and hose and move it so that they don't get crushed. At some point, I was working on cleaning something near the bed and saw them, and thought, "Hey, if I were to put a hook on the side of the nightstand, he could hang the mask there and it would be out of the way of everything." So I did, and he loves it.
The other good thing that's coming out of all this cleaning are the memories. I'm finding a lot of long-forgotten stuff, which has been a lot of fun re-discovering. Being able to actually get into the main room I'm cleaning has meant that I found all of the dragon figurines that I used to collect way back when -- they've been cleaned and are now guarding the TARDIS on my dresser. I found a bunch of Hamtaro stuff from back when I was into that briefly (I used to keep hamsters, so a show with cute hamsters was right up my alley)... and they've all been chucked. It's all about what's important to us now, so I've kept a couple of nice Hamtaro things, but the cheap plastic crap? Gone.
One of the things I was surprised at... I've noted before that while I enjoy both music and writing, the visual arts have always eluded me. I've always wanted to learn to draw but never applied myself and really can't draw at all, I'm terrible at fashion, and while I enjoy calligraphy, it's for the actual writing, not for the presentation (which is why I've dropped out of the calligraphy guild here -- they focus on art with words, and I really wasn't getting much out of it).
Well, I found, in the hall closet, my bin of art supplies and my sketchbook from the art class I took back in around 1995. It was a requirement for the computer programming and graphics degree that I was studying for. I'd done a little drawing when I was a kid (my sister was taking a drawing class in college and came home to teach her little sister a bit of what she was learning), but that class was the only dedicated art class that I've ever taken. I remember that I also did some drawing on my own around that class, not just what we were doing in our lessons.
So, I looked through the sketchbook, and wow. Seeing the drawings, I remember doing them. Some were drawings of portraits from one of my favorite books back then (I was really into Pern at the time and it was a book of an artist's portraits of the characters). Others were fantasy figures that I made up. A couple were prep drawings for projects for class -- one was a drawing of a classmate holding a yardstick out like a sword, because the project was going to be a scene from my favorite book at the time, The Silver Sun by Nancy Springer.
And then I found this (clickable):
I remember doing this: sitting in the dark at the dining table in my apartment, staring at the candle (which was considerably taller when I first started than what you see now) and drawing. When I opened this page for the first time a few days ago, I just kind of stared at it, surprised at how good it was. I mean, it's not anything amazing for someone who has trained and practiced, but it's amazing for me. I guess I can draw to some extent, or at least, I could back then. I could probably pick that back up, but not right now -- I have too many other things I'm working on at the moment.
Anyway, that's it for now. There's lots of other things coming out of this effort that I'll hopefully write about soon, but I need to get back to it. I'm hoping to get this side space clear today, and it won't happen if I don't actually get off my butt.
Not that that's all I've been doing. I've been also devoting some amount of time to music and writing, as well as to learning Japanese (through Duolingo, though I'm getting more and more disenchanted with that app, but I'll talk about that in a different post, maybe). My husband is also trying to get me to play more computer games, saying that the point of me not working is to let me relax and have fun, not just work on different stuff all the time. But there's a substantial part of me that feels really bad that he's working and I'm not, and I don't feel good about having fun when he can't. Also, my gaming computer is in the room where he works, and I'm not comfortable lurking in there when he's in a meeting, which is much of his day. So at least I have that excuse. (The computer I'm on right now is capable of playing my games, but it's a not-particularly-powerful laptop, so performance is crap, and its GPU fan sounds like a jet airplane any time I start up anything that uses at least 1% of the graphics card.)
Anyway...
"Cleaning house" for us is a far larger task than you might expect. This house is a MESS. We're two essentially lazy people, living in this house for over twenty-five years now, who never had kids and never intended to have kids (and thus didn't need to keep the house clean for other people and had a good amount of disposable income), and who don't do activities with friends that involve inviting them over to their house. What does this result in? Huge piles of stuff.
We think we've matured a bit over the last three decades, in that we're kind of appalled at the choices we've made over the years and we take a lot more care now about what we really want to buy and what we can do without. We're also a lot more careful how we handle everyday items, such as making sure that things we take out get put away again (well, at least most of the time). But that still leaves twenty-five years of crap lying around.
So that's been my general task. We chose a particular room to clear out first and I've been concentrating on that, though I have been deviating for smaller tasks and for things that I personally care about. For example, I took a day to clear off my dresser: remove all the things that have strayed onto it, remove and clean all the things that are going to stay up there (such as my Big Chief Studios TARDIS and my Lego ship-in-a-bottle [holy crap, this thing is expensive now; it was only about $60 when I got it]), and wash the runner. It's all back and looking pretty.
Another thing I've done is sorted through clothes and donated gobs of it. For years now, I've been doing laundry and dumping it in that room, and we've been picking from the pile. You know how that goes: you only use the things that are on the top of the pile. Well, at least he's only using the things on the top of the pile; I have a dresser at least, but it's been really full for quite a while, so I've gotten down to only using what's in two of the drawers.
Him, well, he only digs so far down, so eventually, a shirt gets worn out, so he throws it away and says that he needs more shirts, and I get him a few. Well, now, I've gotten through the entire pile and omg he has so much clothing!! I mean, that only makes sense, right? He throws away one shirt and gains three more. Duh. So, I got all of his clothing out of the pile, washed and sorted it, then asked him to go through it and identify what can be donated and which small pile he wants to use currently. Then I boxed up the rest and put it in the garage for when he needs new clothes in the future. Two big bins of clothing.
I'm not much better, mind you. I've gone through my dresser, as well as my stuff that was in the general pile, and donated piles of that stuff, too, and I'm realizing I need to do it again. You see, back in around 2012 or so, I used to hang out with this friend of mine (my only good friend here, really, and we've lost touch since), and she took it upon herself to teach me how to dress, because I have neither fashion sense nor interest. We used to go to Goodwill every couple of months and try on stuff, and she'd show me how to coordinate things, and I'd buy the clothing that looked good. But you guessed it - I never really wore it. Sure, this thing looked good when she was telling me what to wear it with, but I never remembered what it was on my own, and I have no idea if it looks good with any of the other stuff I have.
So that's what my dresser was stuffed with - tons of clothing that I'd never wear. That was two full bags of stuff sent back to Goodwill, and I'm realizing now that I wasn't harsh enough on it. But I have other things that I need to concentrate on first.
But that wasn't really what I had intended to talk about in this post. Funny how that happens, you start with one goal and totally branch off into other goals. Because that's what I'm finding with this project of cleaning the house.
I started with the one room, and it's actually coming along well. The clothes are cleared out, and there's actual floor space now. There'll be more when I finally disassemble and dispose of the world's most uncomfortable couch™. Seriously. The couch was designed to be easily assembled/disassembled, probably for use in a college dorm room, and had been in the basement of my husband's mother's house, where the kids would play video games and such. When we moved out here, she insisted that we take it (along with a couple of other bits of questionable furniture, such as a table made of wood slats spaced far apart, meaning that you can't actually put anything other than magazines on it because it'll just tip over or fall through -- prime example of an object that the designer didn't actually use). Even when it was in good condition, it was not comfortable -- my butt and back would hurt after sitting in it for an hour, and that was when I was in my twenties, when a little achiness didn't matter at all. So, nearly thirty years later, it is finally getting thrown out (next week, to be exact).
But I digress (again)...
The problem is that I'm working on this one room, and I'm like, "Where should I put this? Well, (this place) would be perfect, but that needs to be cleaned out before I can put it there, so..." and I go off to work on that. Last week, I diverted to clean out the hall closet and mostly succeeded, but it's got a couple of things that can't be dealt with quite yet. This week, I diverted to cleaning out a part of another room to set up some bins, but that's exploded now into cleaning up some piles in there as well as piles in another room.
The most frustrating thing is that none of thes projects ever actually finish. I can't finish the hall closet for reasons. The new room I'm working on, I can only proceed so far at this point. I'd like to actually finish something. :P
One thing good that's coming out of all this cleaning and my not needing to spend eight hours a day at a job is that I'm coming up with some great lifehack ideas and implementing them. For example, my husband uses a CPAP machine when he sleeps, and when he gets up, he leaves the mask and hose part on the bed. This means that any time either of us uses the bed in any way, the first thing we have to do is locate the mask and hose and move it so that they don't get crushed. At some point, I was working on cleaning something near the bed and saw them, and thought, "Hey, if I were to put a hook on the side of the nightstand, he could hang the mask there and it would be out of the way of everything." So I did, and he loves it.
The other good thing that's coming out of all this cleaning are the memories. I'm finding a lot of long-forgotten stuff, which has been a lot of fun re-discovering. Being able to actually get into the main room I'm cleaning has meant that I found all of the dragon figurines that I used to collect way back when -- they've been cleaned and are now guarding the TARDIS on my dresser. I found a bunch of Hamtaro stuff from back when I was into that briefly (I used to keep hamsters, so a show with cute hamsters was right up my alley)... and they've all been chucked. It's all about what's important to us now, so I've kept a couple of nice Hamtaro things, but the cheap plastic crap? Gone.
One of the things I was surprised at... I've noted before that while I enjoy both music and writing, the visual arts have always eluded me. I've always wanted to learn to draw but never applied myself and really can't draw at all, I'm terrible at fashion, and while I enjoy calligraphy, it's for the actual writing, not for the presentation (which is why I've dropped out of the calligraphy guild here -- they focus on art with words, and I really wasn't getting much out of it).
Well, I found, in the hall closet, my bin of art supplies and my sketchbook from the art class I took back in around 1995. It was a requirement for the computer programming and graphics degree that I was studying for. I'd done a little drawing when I was a kid (my sister was taking a drawing class in college and came home to teach her little sister a bit of what she was learning), but that class was the only dedicated art class that I've ever taken. I remember that I also did some drawing on my own around that class, not just what we were doing in our lessons.
So, I looked through the sketchbook, and wow. Seeing the drawings, I remember doing them. Some were drawings of portraits from one of my favorite books back then (I was really into Pern at the time and it was a book of an artist's portraits of the characters). Others were fantasy figures that I made up. A couple were prep drawings for projects for class -- one was a drawing of a classmate holding a yardstick out like a sword, because the project was going to be a scene from my favorite book at the time, The Silver Sun by Nancy Springer.
And then I found this (clickable):
I remember doing this: sitting in the dark at the dining table in my apartment, staring at the candle (which was considerably taller when I first started than what you see now) and drawing. When I opened this page for the first time a few days ago, I just kind of stared at it, surprised at how good it was. I mean, it's not anything amazing for someone who has trained and practiced, but it's amazing for me. I guess I can draw to some extent, or at least, I could back then. I could probably pick that back up, but not right now -- I have too many other things I'm working on at the moment.
Anyway, that's it for now. There's lots of other things coming out of this effort that I'll hopefully write about soon, but I need to get back to it. I'm hoping to get this side space clear today, and it won't happen if I don't actually get off my butt.
