Working decently-well as a mind-organization and motivational tool, though honestly getting any of these done would be a bonus, rather than not-getting-them-done being a point of guilt.

( Cut for long.Collapse )

ashnistrike and her wife Nameseeker are HEROES OF THE REVOLUTION.

Omg.

They arrived sometime around 2PMish, ostensibly to 'help me tidy up' and get somewhere on my to-do list for the week, and between then and when they left (having fed us dinner, too, while they were at it) we got about SIX DAYS' WORTH of cleaning done, on even the scale of "John and I being very productive" cleaning days.

( omg!Collapse )

When packing for OVFF (and several housefilks previous), I flipped through my neatly-arranged shelf of songbooks, and wasn't finding at least two or three that I know I have. Meaning they were probably hiding together somewhere.

Just found 'em, which is the YAY! Bigtime. The *argh* is that, given what else was with them, they've been packed up and hidden since about last year this time (there's a 2004 Windycon program book in there). Sigh. I bet I know what happened, though. They were in my laptop backpack (which has been passed over by my husband in favor of the other laptop bag, for daily use), meaning I packed 'em for a con or for tnatj's housefilk, and then given how fried my brain was this time last year, slung it in a corner. Laptop was at some point extracted, rest left in, et voila.

Means I have my own rackafracka copy of the Echo's Children songbook back, though. Also the grey-fronted edition of anach's, which will be nice, and the last printed version of my OWN songbook (which currently exists deconstructedly in various textfiles on my computer, waiting for me to have time and spoons to revamp it and then put it out as a maintanable pdf once more). That latter is surprisingly good, since I'm finding my electronic version now does not have several songs it USED to have, dammit. So if all else fails I can scan 'em and OCR 'em and save myself typing.

Yesterday was blindingly productive. Since next weekend we have a load of furniture[1] arriving[2], we kiiiiinda needed to clear floor space. To put it in. Y'know. So it can be INSIDE our house. Additionally, I'd managed to invite morning_glory and her husband and ADORABLE kidlet over for hanging out/gaming/eating barbecue Saturday, starting at 3PM. Therefore, we were able to use them as an excuse/deadline to clean, with the 'massive amounts of bare floor' goal now joined by 'room to sit people at a table' and 'toddlerproof everything below waist level'.

So I don't forget to say it, WAY FUN describes the evening well. :->

We did pretty well, though I'd managed to completely forget toddlerproofing the upstairs rooms. So we ended up blocking the stairs in a step-overable-by-grownups way. Fun was had by all, and we can now see bare boards for most of the floor area of our great room (living room + dining room, divided only by a big arch). For those who have seen our living situation before, this should be clearly quite an achievement in the 2005 Squalor Mitigation Program.

This also means that the room is bare enough for us to finish PAINTING[3] it. Which was going to be today's task. But when I finally managed to convince myself that getting out of bed was a good idea (however attractive staring off into space for the next six hours seemed at the time), I wasn't up to it, so we went straight up to Grandma's instead, there to spend about 5 hours doing various things[4]. After that, I was completely wasted, and falling asleep in the car. Sigh. So still no painting so far, despite having been home a couple hours. I might do it after dark (I don't mind painting by incandescent light). It seems silly to let it slip another week, since once it's Painted and Done, I can start doing things like hanging framed pictures (of which I have a massive amount, many of which haven't been hung since I lived at my MOTHER'S house). This is a genuinely good goal to aim for, since it leads to things that will make Piles of Stuff stop annoying me. I'm just tired.

---

1. Furniture Specifically, three couches. Plus a few other much smaller things. One of them's a foldout bed/couch. The other two are just large loveseats. Yes, we're going to get rid of one of our existing two couches. On the upside, this will go some distance towards fixing the 'Wow, we had way too many chairs for our old apartment, but now we have three times as many ROOMS!' problem.
   
2. Furniture arriving John's Grandma died. We're taking delivery of the last of the inherited-from-her stuff now that her old condo has sold (the realtor was showing it with furniture in it).
   
3. Finish painting Uhm, yeah. Due to a move-in schedule a week shorter than we thought it'd be, we didn't end up start painting when we thought we would, so 'painting' most of the rooms ended up meaning one whole coat of primer on everything, then a quick slap-up of the colored paint, mostly without edging it in carefully. So most of our rooms have white edges and ripples and such in their corners and especially up by the ceiling.
   
4. Doing various things at Grandma's Today's list:
   • John replaced a dimmer switch that was making alarming sparking noises when adjusted. I helped him find the fusebox, and other associated things.
     
   • Figured out how to adjust, then adjusted, the hinges on Grandma's Ultra Modern 1960s Swedish cabinetry. I could SO sense the ancestral IKEA style in the engineering. So now two of her cabinet doors don't sag and interfere with the drawers beneath them anymore.
     
   • Supervised Grandma doing half of her exercise regimen (she 'got tired' so we quit).
     
   • Watched as she spent eight minutes pedaling on her exerbike (five is our current RDA; then she did three more afterwards later in the visit).
     
   • Kept her company as she made and ate a light lunch (curly lettuce, a generous serving of cottage cheese, and some cold-cut turkey cut into strips on top).
     
   • Going through Saturday's mail accumulation, throwing out the beg-letters. Which was all of it.
     
   • Checking her voicemail (no messages)
     
   • Grocery shopping to stock up the things she goes through quickly.

Good Things about this weekend just past:

• I got to see the in-laws some more. I enjoy hanging out with/talking with them muchly.
  
• Lots and lots of good restaurant food. Which I didn't have to pay for. There is no bad here. [1]
  
• I saw a movie the marquee at the theatre insisted on calling "Charlie and the Chocolate Fact". I enjoyed it, though, like the restaurant food, I'm kinda glad I wasn't paying. Review to follow at some point.
  
• Yay for brother-sister silliness, esp. involving my husband! Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans may have to become a new party-game icebreaker. The out of context quotes were just too good. [2]
  
• Thanks to Grandma B, I finally talked myself into a Netflix membership. Currently watched-through-them: Spider-Man 2 [3] and The Terminal (partial, so far; I'll watch the rest with John soon and send it back). On the way but not yet watched: Finding Neverland.
  
• Jo gave me a copy of Finding Serenity, a Firefly-litcrit book which is REALLY REALLY GOOD. Like Take the Red Pill, only not about The Matrix.
  
• Social meters nicely topped up and comfy-full.
  

Bad Things about this weekend just past:

• I was 'out in public' and 'on', socially, the ENTIRE DAMN EVENING at any time I wasn't sleeping. Period. This is really wearing.
  
• Lots of Grandma B stuff, which is really, REALLY wearing, and also terrifying and confusing.
  
• Not enough sleep.
  
• Not enough coping-strategy recharging.
  
• Didn't get any chores of any sort done all weekend, so lawn is less watered and there were huge mounds of laundry I'd already been ignoring. I've done most of the laundry now, which is good. And it's not like lawn-watering is something we're compulsive about in the best of times.
  
• I don't even want to think about how many times we were at Old Orchard over the weekend. [4] I think we were up there every single day between Friday and Monday. Not that I dislike Old Orchard per se, just it got old.
  
• It was fecking hot all weekend. I blame the in-laws. They clearly brought Toronto's heat-and-humidity wave with them, 'cause today it's much cooler and they just left. :->
  

Today

Tonight we're going to be in Grant Park watching Annie Hall for free in open air; if you're going, I'd love to talk to you, though I'm going to be nipping in right as it starts projecting, because I work till 9. If you see John (picture) setting up chairs, feel free to snag a place nearby, or introduce yourself, or both. "I read your wife's LJ" is a suitable introduction and will not confuse him. :->

And I catalogued another two boxes of books into Readerware ... and didn't checkpoint the database, so when it crashed out while looking stuff up online, poof gone all the work. Dammit. I know far better than that.

( Angsty I-suckness within.Collapse )

---

Footnotes

1. Restaurants - The Celtic Knot in Evanston, despite being 'an Irish Pub', has KICKASS food, and amazing service, and is very very good and recommendable. Also, I was startled by the large number of staff members with the appropriate accent. Apparently there is live music some nights.
   
   
2. Bertie Botts humor - "Well, I don't know what these two are, but they could be either Vomit or Spaghetti, given the box. Here, you take one and I'll take the other."
   *eats* "Uhm. I think you got the Spaghetti, because this is DEFINITELY not it."
   "No, dude, this is NOT spaghetti."
   "Eew. I guess we both got Vomit. Here, have a Soap, it helps."
   "That's not half bad, really. Kind of floral. Though I like Grass a lot better."
   Etc. Comedy gold. Esp. at 11 at night, with the parents boggling that they're even eating the horrid things.
   
   
3. Spider-Man 2 - Second viewing for me, first for John and Grandma -- though she lost the thread early on and we stopped. She loses track of what's going on in a movie disturbingly fast. But as long as she enjoys it, I suppose.
   
   
4. Going to Old Orchard - Starting Friday night, when my littler little sister talked us into taking her to the Harry-Potterathon party at Buns&Noodles. Which we left at about 11, because we were sick of sitting there; she had no money on her; if I was going to blow $20 on a hardcover I was reading it FIRST, dammit; and we figured they'd run out anyhow. So we went home. And everyone on my friends list is talking about the damn book and I'm TRYING to be GOOD here folks and not blow the money but damn I want to see what all these interesting people are saying about it. Pooh. :->

     The Holy Housecleaner is coming tomorrow night. And I have a Plan.

     See, there are things about the ergonomics of our living space that have been annoying me for a while. Aside from the Piles of Stuff I need help to go through (which is really why I hired the Holy Housecleaner in the first place, though we haven't really gotten around to that yet. Sigh). I mean things like, if I want to log in and check friends, do lj, read newsgroups, I had to go hide in my little cave back in the computer room, with my back to the door and surrounded by My Stuff. Admittedly, it was a nice cave. But there are times when I wanted to check stuff AND do other things, wandering in and out, or chat with the guys, and it wasn't set up for that.

     Then Jack had a suggestion, that came up in the course of discussing whether or not Mitchell was moving out (I still have to do a 'things our roommate does that infuriate us' post, for y'all, for me, and for him) or not and whether we'd need another roomie, and what we'd do with the room that'd free up. Y'see, the room Mitchell has is really the least convenient of the bedrooms, and in fact is the hardest to keep cool in summer and warm in winter. We have three bedrooms. Two of them (Mitchell's and the one Jack and I sleep in) have built-in loft beds. The third one is in the middle, and just screamed 'study' when we moved in, so it got made over into my craft room. Then we needed a roommate, so Jack pulled his computers out of the back bedroom and the middle bedroom became the computer room, with bunches of my craft stuff still shoved back in the corners, but no longer particularly useful because the whole place was so damn jammed.

     But I digress - though you needed the backstory. :-> So, Jack suggested that perhaps the middle bedroom would be more useful as a library, with bookshelves alllll around the walls, and his grandmother's fancy tall clock on one wall, back in there where it was safe. It boggled me at first, but gradually I came to see the use of it.

     Let me give you a mental sketch of our dining room's organization at that time: Wall with the bedrooms in it has shelves on it, starting about ribcage height, with My Stuff piled on them in a disorganized way. The opposite wall has our heater in the center of it, a tall skinny nice efficient one now and not the monster we had before that was the size of a small sofa and did jack and shit towards heating the house. To the left of the heater, two bookshelves back up against each other to make a kind of wallish thing around the edge of the arch that separates our nominal 'dining room' from the 'living room'. To the right, piled in the corner was Jack's Massive Amounts of Computer Hardware. Kind of in front of that and before the heater was our dining table, looking oversized because of the room it has to fit into. On the left, by the bookcase and spilling right up to the heater, is another pile of My Stuff.

     Ok, you got that? Well, this weekend I moved my computer workspace out to the dining room, and Jack put his Pile of Hardware in our (tiny, oddshaped, not very useful) closet. It's amazing. I dont' have to hide in a cave to use my computer anymore. We want to move his workspace out near mine, but the dining table's in the way at the moment. I think it's going to live over where the pile of My Stuff is now (which means we have to go through it. I think I need to sit on the housecleaner tomorrow night. We finally have space to spread stuff out while sorting it into more useful piles, boxes, and stacks).

     So basically we have A Good Plan, but the 'moving Jack's workspace out and making a little computer-lab feeling place in the dining room' part is on hold until My Stuff is dealt with. We can move a few bookcases into where my computer workspace used to be once I clear out the Random Things that were piled all over my table in there and are now *cough* kind of strewn. Also, I was using the walls nicely for storage and organization, and my spool racks, bulletin board, etc, all have to come down before we can put a bookcase on that wall.

     Should be cool, though. We have a Plan. It's a Good Plan. It's achievable before, say, next May (to pick the absolute earliest we could possibly move), and it both enables and encourages the Going Through of My Stuff (which has been a goal for years, but has never come close to being accomplished before).

P.S. - it's amazing how much bigger my monitor is when it's less than two feet from my face, though I did initially make that design choice myself. It's a 17-incher, wow! I feel almost disloyal lusting after a flatscreen (it'll take up a LOT less space and make less heat, but those of the same size are more than I want to pay right now, and I'm finding myself getting USED to having a 17-incher).

     Sigh. Well, I'm not doing what I thought I would be with this journal, but I'm managing to keep it up with a post a day, at least. I've got some topics queued to be talked about the next time I can actually haul the energy out to go all verbal with them - Personal History topics, mostly, with a general space-advocacy kind of topic tossed in there. Hopefully the interim 'what I did today, and what I did yesterday, and the day before that' entries aren't too tedious, though they strike me as such when I write them. Somehow, if it's not a Topic, or for a Point, it doesn't seem 'real' to me, it just seems like the meandering maunderings of an unfocussed, egotistical mental exhibitionist. Which isn't to say you might not be the sort who likes that kind of thing, of course :-> I was just aiming for something a little more ... I don't know. Literary. Or at least, practicing to be literary LATER.

     My mom has gone off to field camp in Wyoming, where the only communication is a $7/min satellite phone (needless to say, used as little as possible), or calling the ranch-house of the family who owns the land, and having them drive out in a pickup with the message. She's doing what she's wanted to do since she was a wee slip of a girl (digging dinos), and I envy her greenly, though heat, sweat, and exertion with bugs and dust aren't, per se, my idea of fun. :-> She's just so ... fulfilled, lately.

     I have a creeping suspicion my last few days' funk is the flipside of the happy-manic phase I had over the weekend and the like, in the aftermath of the Holy Housecleaner. She's not coming again till next Wednesday, sigh, though Jack's trying to keep momentum going and tidy when she ain't here. Personally, in a lot of ways, I'm perfectly willing to wait for her. Certainly before dealing with The Boxes. Rearranging books onto different shelves so we can take down the old shelves, reinforce them, and put them back up in a more useful layout is definitely something I can deal with in the abstract. In the particular, it's sometimes a bit too much for me, when I'm funkified and unmanic.

     But hey, I have a new (to me) Nintendo 64 waiting for me at home, and a poem I'm fiddling with setting to music, and a Much Cleaner House than I've had in MONTHS. So I've no rational reason for despair, right? Buck up, kid, and all that.

     And Real Entries will be forthcoming soon, I promise.