Clearing Away the Mess

This morning I looked around my house and saw all the accumulated clutter from the past five weeks. During those weeks I packed for a trip by pulling things out of their usual places. Then I unloaded my suitcases, but not everything got put away. I was too busy preparing for a convention, which required me to pull out a completely different set of things. Also there was an art show, which strewed another set of paraphernalia about. While I was away on my trip, Howard brought home a drawing table and assorted gear from Dragon’s Keep, because he’s drawing at home now. Some of the gear is duplicates, most of it is sitting in boxes waiting for me to have time to decide where it goes. Then I came home from the convention bringing back piles of things which need to be put away.

One of the troubles with having so many piles of things, it means that even when I know exactly where the item I’m holding belongs, there is probably a pile between me and that location. So instead of putting the item away, I set it on a pile to put away later. Piles beget more piles until the entire house is full of piles which must be moved out of the way in order to accomplish anything useful.

This morning I looked around and realized that the most important business task I could accomplish would be to clean house. So I spent many hours of my work day organizing and putting away. There is much work yet to do, but it is begun.

I’ve also begun dismantling our back deck. The railings are off and we pried up enough boards to shine a flashlight underneath. That part was a little bit scary. I really did not know what we would see. I feared hornet’s nests and massive spiders because I swear that there were bugs or webs in every single join of every single board I removed. I no longer consider it a nice deck. It was a massive bug and spider house. Apparently. Underneath was actually pretty boring. There was dirt. We started at the far corner from where the rotted support is because we’ve seen leaf cutter bees flying in and out over there. If I have to deal with angry insects, I want to have time to know that they are there first. I’ll probably do a post with pictures, but it’ll probably wait until I have pictures of every stage.

Now I need to rest so I can have a similar work day tomorrow. We’ve had five weeks of running around. The next five weeks we’ll all stay home. I’m looking forward to that.