Tag: progress

Decluttering Revived

After some very low-energy days I am back at it again. I baked a cake for my husband’s birthday yesterday, made french toast for breakfast and nachos for lunch yesterday as well. Today I have picked up the decluttering baton and worked on the front hallway. It was, of course, a disaster. I only snapped on pic of said disaster though so you will have to imagine the rest.

So, you have to imagine shoes Everywhere, dirt, sand, leaves etc. It was pretty bad.

Anyway, I spent some time picking up, sweeping, vacuuming, and setting aside some stuff to toss or give away, depending on the state of the item, and the entryway is improved if not yet finished.

Clearly it’s a work in progress…

The bags and boxes of stuff to give away is getting a little bit much. Also half the basement is full of foam computer bags connected to my husband’s work. It would be awesome to see all of it gone. There is just SO MUCH and a lot of it needs to go. Even all those damned shoes, we don’t need all of those and I’m positive that some of them haven’t been worn in ages and don’t fit anyone. Such a mess. I also need to sort through that basket of gloves, hats and scarves and get rid of the matchless, the ruined and the unneeded.

I let the dishes slip yesterday so I need to get back on that. I cooked 2 meals and baked a cake, prepped and ran The Slithering RPG for a bit of a celebration. The Fall birthdays continue! It felt bad giving my husband one skinny little book for his birthday, I think I will score him a bottle of the scotch he likes next chance I get.

My paints are all out in the shed and need to come back in the house for the winter. Bummer. I can’t let them freeze but I hate to bring more stuff into the house. In trying to get clutter under control I’m trying to use the library instead of buying books. It’s difficult. Books are my thing, my life, my weakness, my downfall when it comes to stopping spending. I’m doing fine at the moment, but I know there are books that I can get through the library and read and will still desperately want to buy anyway. :/ Anything featuring both Sherlock Holmes and Cthulhu is pretty much already bought. Whether it is written yet or not even conceived of at this time, it is as if those volumes are already in my hands and on my shelves. I always have a short list of books I “need.”

Everywhere I look, aside from the areas I’ve recently worked on, there is clutter. It’s depressing, draining and sometimes feels insurmountable. That’s why I need to take it one step at a time. If I do this slowly, and correctly, I might just get this all under control and have the nice, clean, fairly orderly, homey home I want to live in. I’m trying. Day by day, I am trying, and I can’t really ask much more than that of myself.

Random items of progress and frustration

It’s been a big day so far. We had to take trash and recycling to the transfer station and buy more bags from them. Our town sells town branded trash bags for $2 a piece instead of a flat fee for the year. I like it because it motivates me to produce less trash. Then, because the tree by the driveway has been going just crazy and the car has barely moved, we took the car to no-human-interaction car wash to clean it off, then realized we needed gas too so we took care of that too. That is as big an outing as we’ve had in a month. Crazy. While we were out about 90% of the people we saw out walking and doing things (seen from the relative safety of our sealed car) did not have masks on.

I’ve continued to work on my shed, using things we already own, junk I chucked in the basement and things like that. I’ve got more lights out there now, and I brought out loads of art supplies and a string of purple lights. I found a bunch of teas in metal tins at the back of the tea cupboard and brought them out there, it’s nice to have a variety and these teas haven’t been seeing any use. They are also distinct from the teas I use in the house so it creates more of a feeling of getting away. Most of them are blends I created myself too, makes me feel good to consume things I had a hand in creating, or to use things I created, I love that feeling.

This far into the day and I have no idea what dinner will be. Bad mommy. LOL. At this point I am so burned out on cooking it is just crazy. I don’t know what to make! I am so sick of having to decide, having to come up with stuff, it’s so relentless. I mean, not ALL the time. Some times, especially right after we get a delivery of groceries, I feel inspired and excited to cook again, for a night or 2, sometimes for a breakfast and lunch or 2. I look at what we have and I want to make stuff again. A few days later and here I am… uninspired, cranky, and ready for anyone else in the world to do the cooking. I forget to thaw things on time, I forget to order key ingredients or they just aren’t available… what is that? My whole life has been lived with the potential to just go and get anything, maybe I couldn’t afford to do that, but the foods were all there. I wanted a couple of cans of lentils the other week and the store was out of them, lentils. Nothing in my life prepared me for how utterly weird that is. That’s the kind of story my parents used to tell us kids about Russia. Like supposedly Russian people would wait in a line forever and ever and just get whatever the hell they were selling or giving out or something, because communism. (hold on, I need to add lentils to my order again, see if I can get any)

In 24 hours, or thereabouts, I have cut back on web surfing, TV and so forth. Proving nothing, anybody can do anything for a day. We’ll see how I get on. I think our savings are about to dip again, we had to have the septic system cleaned out, omg so expensive, and we need to pay all our bills again. One of our bills actually went up $10/month for no reason, the jerks just want to charge us more so we’re stuck with it. WTF? I thought we weren’t supposed to have monopolies in this country. To keep not spending money, as I want to do, I need to plan some kind of dinner tonight. Ummmmmmmmm…. I suppose that’s a question better answered or pondered in front of the open pantry.

Killing Stress with New Skills

Life is hard. It just is. So fucking hard. My house is like some kind of stress factory and I spend so much time doing emotional work for others that I am tired All The Time. Things tend to feel stagnant, like no progress is being made, especially re. the kids. Eldest is still working part time for minimum wage although her hours are up because of holiday busyness. Youngest is in 11th grade and muddling along doing as little as he can get away with doing but he is finding some joy there, some interest, the future remains a Giant Ball of Dread to him though. Middlest is going along at community college with a 3/4 schedule + work-study. She’s seen one paycheck so far and it covered less than 1/10th of he tuition, books and art supplies, hopefully there will be a flurry of checks SOON. Husband is in his last semester for his latest degree and is fully stressing out. He has 8 days to write a 25 page paper and he has a few paragraphs so far. I think panic is about to set in. His job is also driving him full-on Crazy right now with a huge and scary server migration + the replacement of all copiers and printers etc etc. He’s supposed to be focusing on these VERY IMPORTANT trainings on the new server stuff so he can, you know, DO his job, but gets interrupted every 1-2 minutes by people with piddly little problems they want fixed “now.” His assistant is trying very hard to keep people away from him but he’s still getting over 25 emails per hour all day long.

Yeah, so stressful is the word. Slow progress for kids, too much on husband’s plate, we’re all border-lining on illness most of the time now. My headaches are getting worse, I assume it’s stress. I am trying to make home a sanctuary from all the madness by continuing to declutter, getting nice meals on the table daily, keeping healthy snacks on hand as well as cocoa, wine and beer, and of course I am always cleaning, keeping the fire going and so on. I’m finding my peace in learning new skills and trying new things. I watch Li Ziqi on YouTube because everything she does is both relaxing to watch and completely inspiring. I’ll be watching while I knit and my husband will glance up to see her using hand tools to just flat out make something out of trees she cut down or something and he’ll ask: “what’s she making? I seriously wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be a working helicopter made from scrap metal and bamboo.” All I can say is; “Right????” Some of her stuff has no English translation to it at all so I watch the whole video completely confused by what veggies she’s cooking but in the end I want to eat it all, anyway even with all my allergies, because her cooking looks so amazing I swear I can almost smell it. Here’s a link to her channel if you’re interested: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoC47do520os_4DBMEFGg4A

So, new skills I’ve been working on:

  • Learning to dry fruits and veggies. So far: oranges, apples, cranberries and hot peppers.
  • Darning socks, I haven’t got this figured out yet, it doesn’t look all that hard but it turns out to be tricky.
  • Making my own lip-balm. SO EASY! Plus I get custom flavors and simple ingredients.
  • Making my own laundry detergent, yeah, I’m doing this right now as I type. I’ve got baking soda cooking away at 400 degrees to turn it into washing soda and then I grate up some soap, mix everything together with Borax and apparently That’s IT.

There are loads of skills I want to learn that will keep me busy… probably the rest of my life if I’m honest. I want to learn to garden, to grow my own food and herbs, I want to learn to make clothes that look good, presentable, tailored I guess, that are well-made and will last. I want to learn to build things, whatever I need really, like shelves, or raised garden beds, or wooden furniture. I want to learn languages, so many, so, so many, I can’t even choose where to start. I also like to learn to make pretty much all household cleaners and such-like things. It’s stunning how much we pay for stuff like that and it’s made out of pretty simple stuff for the most part. I’m sure I’ll let you know how my experiments go.

Day by Day

One foot in front of the other, day by day, slow progress is made. The dried apple slices made on the wood stove dried faster than in the oven and came out better as well. Good information! I will try drying orange slices atop the wood stove next. ^_^ This morning I have put together the beginning of some sourdough starter… hopefully. It seems this can fail so we’ll see how it goes.

Today the carpenter and handy person are supposed to come put in the steps to my loft in my soon-to-be studio, move the ceiling hook for my candle/chandelier-thing, and do a little trim work. This is the last of what I can afford to have done now, probably until Spring. I hope the space will be usable this winter because I am getting anxious and need to create. I’ve been waiting my whole life for this space, I didn’t know it, but I have been. I may try to put up insulation myself. My son swears you can learn anything on YouTube and I’ve used it to learn things before so he’s probably right.

I’m exhausted. My sleep is still disturbed by my sweet husband’s snoring, the cats, my anxiety, etc. I start my days with a to-do list that frequently gets derailed by someone else’s need for emotional work. That’s mostly ok, I mean, I want to help those I care about, Obviously, it’s just draining and largely unacknowledged, invisible. Yesterday I think it was texting with my husband about work/stress/career-change/happiness/contentment/etc. for over an hour. Often it’s talking him down from a bout of “I’m a bad dad”… which he absolutely is NOT. Sometimes it’s a long, mid-night session of listening to one of my kid’s heartache and pain while offering love and acceptance, telling them they are NOT an alien for having their feelings, etc. Sometimes my husband needs to be talked around about how he hasn’t “wasted” the past 6 years getting a couple of degrees, how that has value no matter what he chooses to do next. I’m glad I’m available to do all this, they need it, I can do it, that’s good! The not so good part is that it takes time, effort, emotional energy, and then I’m behind. I lose productive hours of daylight, I lose needed hours of sleep, I lose focus on planning things I’m in charge of like “What’s for dinner tonight?” … … … oh yeah, dinner, oops. But on the whole I’m glad I’m here to do it and I am positive my husband does some emotional work for me sometimes.

Tomorrow is our 17th wedding anniversary. We’ve been together over 22 years now. How mad is that? It doesn’t seem like it could be that long ago, that lovely wedding on that cold, gray day, 17 years? I think we’ll go out to dinner. I’ll still need to make sure there is something on deck for the kids, I think we’re out of those chicken patty things they tend to rely on when I don’t cook. Still, I’ll probably just throw rice in the cooker and tell them to cook some kielbasa, then I’ll shower, put on a pretty dress, some perfume, and head out to one of our favorite places or maybe we’ll try a new place.

who do i want to be?

I want to be kind. I mean… I am kind, for the most part, but I get angry, get shirty with people, definitely cuss people out in traffic. They can’t hear me cuss them out, I only use my horn if it’s a safety issue, but i DO cuss them out. I’m certain that doesn’t count as nice or kind. Kindness is magic. So i’m working on that.

I want to be a good mother who helps her kids become functional, happy adults, and i want to be a good wife who helps her husband find happiness in this stressful world. I want to be a good teen librarian who provides books and programming that make a positive difference in the lives of the teens i serve. I want to find some success as a writer and an artist. I want to be the kind of friend that people want to spend time with. i want to be healthy and fit.

Obviously i have a certain level of success at some of these things but i’m working on improving in all of them. It’s all a struggle but hopefully worth it. I guess we’re all works in progress until we’re dead but wouldn’t it be nice to hit a comfortable plateau? (sorry for the random capitalization, my keyboard is having some issues.)

Progress

I’m getting somewhere.

After a long time of feeling like no progress was being made in almost any areas of my life I am making some headway, however small, in more than one area.

Decluttering: In the past few weeks I have filled up the trunk of my car twice and dropped everything off at the Survival Center. Several bags of clothes, a few boxes of books, some household goods, and loads of CDs, DVDs, and video games are all gone. I’ve also been making an effort to put some items away that had been left in awkward places for MONTHS. Moving some of the things I will use for my studio to the shed has helped too. The house is feeling less out of control and more livable. I’m getting somewhere!

Meal Planning: Officially back on track after mucking it up for a while. It’s been 2 solid weeks now that I have planned everything out and I’m doing well. I even turned down an invitation to go out tonight for someone’s birthday because it would muck up the schedule and becauseI hate biggish plans last minute. I like small invites like let’s go get coffee/tea, are you free? But Dinner and movie on a Tuesday? The movie theater they are going to is over an hour from our house and the movie wouldn’t be getting out till after 10:00. My husband has classwork and we need to be here to make sure the kids do their homework too. I don’t know these folk’s exact schedules but I am willing to bet they don’t have to be up at 6 am tomorrow. I initially thought they meant this weekend some time. Spontaneity seems fun but I don’t have that kind of freedom.

Work: I am getting near to having things planned out three months in advance as my boss requested! Once I nail down a couple of dates for events and get some flyers made I will be right where I want to be and will just have to keep up planning for that 3rd month in the future as I go. Awesome. I am also about halfway through with pulling together my plans for next summer’s Summer Reading Program. I am starting to feel less overwhelmed and under-qualified. ^_^

My Son: His therapist reports progress is being made! He is less depressed and some of his other issues are lessening in intensity and he is feeling better. He reports he is doing well keeping up with school work and doing well socially! BAM! ^_^ That is awesome.

There are loads of areas that are still pretty much sucking but I am just going to be happy about all this progress right now. Things are good. Things are good!

Dungeons & Damsels

Today provided a ray of hope in a dim world for me.

My son, so shy, awkward, sooooo unsure, reached out, ever so slightly to the girl he’s got his eye on. He offered to share his dice tray during the game today when she was having nothing but ill luck. “Use my dice tray. It’s lucky.” Was what he said. She said “thanks” and they each looked down at the table and failed to contain the slightest of sweet smiles.

She’s as awkward and shy as he is. Bless her until the end of time. Her shyness gives him enough hope of not making an idiot of himself to try. Now he just needs to invite her somewhere, needs the confidence to ask her to come to a Renn faire or something. If she says yes then we’ll just need some slight coaching for conversation and offering to pay for her snacks and such. My sweet boy can do it, he can find someone to love in this dark world, I know it. Yes, he has his issues with depression and anxiety but he is also intelligent as hell and funny and kind. (not to mention gorgeous, what a cutie. I’m not biased, you’re biased! ;P )

He also did really well helping the new kid, younger kid, who just joined the game. My lad was patient and kind when I knew this kid was plucking my lad’s last nerve. He did better than my husband did displaying patience gently instructing the kid on how to play. It was pretty adorable. How can I worry so much about this kid? He has such strengths.

And he’s talking to a cute girl! ^_^

Minor Revelations

My 17 year old is depressed and anxious. He’s also very introverted and doesn’t feel motivated to hang out with people so we have to push him to do that. He has fun when he does, usually. His therapist has been giving him assignments over the past year, to hang out with peers, to introduce himself to people, to reach out more in general, to get involved in activities with others. Recently, my husband has started giving him assignments too. He told our son to pick a girl he finds attractive (at this art activity he was in) and walk up to her before he left and just say “I really like what you did, it’s cool.” and smile. He did it! (I freaking saw him do it because I was running the activity)

He does try to do all the things we and the therapist suggest to him. He and his dad have been running in the mornings for a few weeks and eating better too. He used to drink a ton of juice and juice, beyond a small glass or 2 per day is rubbish for you. It’s basically all sugar. I took juice away a while ago and the kid lost 12 pounds in a few weeks. I’ve been trying to get him to drink water all along, it being the actual liquid our bodies crave, but he hasn’t been into it at all. Since our weekend away at the Cape, besides decluttering I’ve been washing up the dishes right after meals and also keeping a full pitcher of water in the fridge. Suddenly the kid is drinking water all the time. I can’t believe it, he hated water, now he loves it because it’s cold from the fridge. He’s also eating fruit, especially grapes, he and my husband agree that grapes are AWESOME right after their morning run.

Oh, and he also wants to get into Tae Kwan Do now. The only exercise I’ve ever been able to get him to do was swimming! A whole combination of things has come together and all these long wanted changes are suddenly happening. He’s been in therapy and on meds for a year, we’re eating family meals together much more consistently, there is cold water in the fridge at all times, and he started running with his dad. He is becoming a happier, healthier kid. Some changes are dramatic and some are subtle but they are happening. He and my husband are both losing weight. Oh, for anyone who’s wondering, they are using something called “Couch to 5K” it’s an app you can get for your phone that tells you what to do each day and builds you up to being able to run 5K. I’ve been walking using the new Harry Potter game as motivation because I am on my feet at home and at work much more than they are and I don’t like running. (Plus, Harry Potter ^_^ )

Do any other Gen-Xers out there find parenting to be this insane guessing game? I’ve always looked back on my own upbringing and found almost nothing but a negative example from my Boomer parent’s F***-ups. They were a lesson in what NOT to do but I still struggled with what TO do. Yeah, I chose not to punish my kids by hitting them, I chose not to dole out art supplies with an eye dropper, I chose not to force them to subscribe to any particular religion or anything, lots of mistakes of my parents I was able to side step… but not doing things isn’t really much to go on. I read to my kids like crazy, I made loads of art with them, I reasoned with them rather than using punishment, (at least 90% of the time) and I fed them, clothed them, housed them, loved the stuffing out of them. We always had plenty of pets, usually a sane amount like 4 or less but occasionally more, and had the kids help care for them. We didn’t demand high grades, middling were ok, we didn’t send them to a lot of activities… and that’s one thing I would go back and change. I think that was a mistake. We should have had them in activities and lessons more, at least to try way more things out. It’s too late now, maybe we can still do a little of that for our youngest but it’s too late for the older 2.

Why does that make me feel like such a failure? Parenting has been a very seat-of-our-pants affair and our parents were no help at all. We’ve done the best we could, taken our best guesses, but I feel awful for what I didn’t do that I now think might have helped. Even if you read books by so-called experts on parenting they all contradict each other and the general advice changes every few years. What the heck are we supposed to do with all that? So, here I am, trying to help my kids where they are now, basically having to hope that loving them so much all these years will have been enough so that they can still get to the point of Adult Functioning… even if it’s LATE. And still hoping all this won’t kill my beautiful, wonderful marriage to the best guy I’ve ever met.

I’m trying to build myself up to be more hopeful but I live in Bummerville.

Buried Alive Under Books and Craft Supplies

Does anyone else worry that they could easily become a hoarder? Is it just me? I have a lot of stuff, my family has a lot of stuff, we have too much stuff. There’s so much stuff in the world and companies are forever making more. Loads of things seem super-cool but when you collect too many of them they become … clutter and instead of making me happy all those things start to make me feel sad and stressed.

The house never really looks nice and presentable because clutter cannot be organized it can only be gotten rid of or just shuffled from one location around the house to another. I can hardly leave the house without coming back with a book, or two, or a whole bag I got cheaply or even for free somewhere. So there are books EVERYWHERE. I love them. To be fair to myself I am also good at getting rid of books. I often sort through them and choose several to pass along to friends, donate to a library sale or post on paperbackswap.com to trade for other books. I used to sell books I no longer needed to a used bookstore, I sold them by the box-full. My whole family are gamers so we also have a TON of games. We have board games, card games, video games, roleplaying game book and figures and maps etc etc. We have about as many dice as our local game store but you watch, next time I’m in that game store they will have some shiny new dice in a fancy new swirly color I haven’t seen before and BAM! I will buy them and hide them in the closet for one of the kids for Xmas! We also have pounds and pound of arts and crafts supplies. We have yarn, fabric, paper, canvases, pens, pencils, paints, clay and other sculpting materials, loads of saved lids, rolls, tops, boxes, cases, and other packaging and such waiting for us to be inspired. We will one day be buried alive beneath toppled towers of such things. Well, I don’t want to go out like that, so I have finally, seriously, embraced decluttering.

I started this past Tuesday after we returned from a short trip to the Cape. It was so nice in the cabin, there were enough things there, enough dishes and pots and pans to cook and eat, a couple of games and puzzles, a sane number of books. It was so peaceful not having to deal with what I’ve come to think of as “too many choices.” We didn’t watch shows or fall into our computers much at all. We sat drinking tea and eating bagels on the porch watching humming birds joust for the rights to the feeder. We listened to the wind in the trees and the ocean. We played a few games, we walked on the beach. Obviously, now that we’re home, we have to work and the beach is hours away. I can’t make what we had on vacation our actual way of life but I realized that one of the nicest things about it all wasn’t the ocean or the beach it was the simplicity. There were just enough dishes and utensils so they needed to be washed pretty immediately but even if we left them in the sink there were only so many so it never felt out of control. LIGHTBULB MOMENT!

I came home and looked at all the dishes we have. About 3 full sets of dishes; one that was bought for us as a gift and 2 that we inherited when family members died. We do not need 3 sets of dishes! I packed one set away because one of my kids wants it when/if they move out and get a place of their own and I can’t quite face choosing between the other 2 sets yet, but I’ve organized them in a saner manner for now. They all fit in one cupboard now. I was able to part with about 50% of our wine glasses and over 50% of our mugs. I culled the baking and serving dishes, table cloths, votive holders, decorative … things? I’ve been paring down my wardrobe and my book collection, our games, movies and CDs, even the craft supplies. It’s only been a few days but there is a difference around here already. I’m starting to feel a little less stressed by the clutter because it is shrinking.

Ideally, I’d like to end up with enough books, games, dishes, clothes, towels and so forth to just feel comfortable. I hope at some point to have things pared down to a point where even moving wouldn’t be a huge ordeal because packing would be the work of a few hours or at worst a single day. I know that is unrealistic in the short term so I am trying to set reasonable goals. So far I’ve only been tackling the kitchen, dining room and a bit of the laundry room. I don’t think I’m finished with those rooms but the progress feels good. Getting rid of stuff is good, not bringing it home in the first place has to be something I work toward. I need to STOP bringing home books and yarn especially. I need to find something that soothes me that ISN’T shopping. Retail therapy is awful and it’s only made me more unhappy.