Mary

Josh and I went through our closet and filled a big box of clothes to go to Goodwill. I've been meaning to do this for a while, especially to my sweaters and button down shirts. I bought a bunch of them a few years ago when I needed to be more dressed up for work. And since I was in a hurry to get enough to wear everyday without doing laundry all the time, I ended up buying a bunch that only sort of fit and I only sort of liked. Several years of purchasing clothes later, this is so not a problem anymore... the problems lately have been finding something I want to wear among all the stuff that I don't want to wear in my closet, and a severe shortage of hangers. Neither should be problems anymore.

I still need to do the same to the clothes in my dresser. I may need another box for that. I think there may also be a box of clothes under the bed that has been closed up since we got here. If that is indeed correct, I might take it as is to the Goodwill... after checking to make sure that my Square One TV shirt isn't in there (not going to wear that again, but also not getting rid of it).

I think I have too many clothes. At least they almost all came from Goodwill (etc) in the first place.

ETA: Filled another box. Stuff under bed was 1 part things I have been looking all over for, 1 part clothes I was enthusiastic to be rid of, and 1 part old tee shirts that have sentimental value even though I don't ever expect to wear them again.

Home made laundry soap is even easier with a food processor. This, a great idea from Josh.

Before, I grated the soap (which is pretty easy, it's really soft). Today I sliced the bar of soap twice long ways and 4 times short ways then dropped it in the food processor with the borax (1/2 cup) and washing soda (1 cup). Let it run for a few minutes to get a nice fine powder. Could hardly be easier...

However, I did have to cut the project slightly short (3 bars of soap worth instead of 4) when I ran out of washing soda. It's still like a 6 month supply or something.

All my work last weekend really paid off. It's noon on Saturday and the house is already nice and tidy. The laundry is already done (including some hand wash stuff that's been waiting for months). The kitchen is clean. Josh vacuumed. I even put in an hour and a half of work work this morning. So I have this whole weekend laid out ahead of me, and no idea what to do with it. Plus, I don't feel like I want to crawl under a rock and hide until I feel happier. This hasn't happened in, like, ages.

I think maybe I'll sit outside and do some reading. Plus, play with the new firmware on my camera. Anyone (Jen???) have suggestions of software to use on my new RAW format photos? I'm excited to now be shooting in RAW mode... but I no longer have access to all the code I wrote at work at NG to process 12-bit color images. Plus, I don't own Matlab or have it at work anymore... (I still can't quite believe how sad about that I am). I miss that job and I miss Lisa.

Our lock on our front door has been very stiff and hard to unlock since we moved in. Basically, it catches about 1/4 inch from unlocked, and it's really hard to get it that last 1/4 inch. It's a bit easier on the inside though, because you have more leverage. Shortly after we moved in, Josh put some WD40 on the shaft and in the keyhole, and that helped, but it was still difficult. Last Friday night, we ended up going in through the garage it was so stiff. I decided we should just replace the lock, but I didn't know how hard that would be. So I grabbed a screw driver and started taking the lock apart to see. Turns out, there's not much to disassembling a lock, but once we had it open and started fiddling with it, we could see where it was catching! We lathered it up good with the WD40 and put it back together. Now the lock works like a dream! Last night, coming home with my hands full, I was able to unlock and open the door with one hand!!!!! Ah, life's little pleasures...

( Run down of my full day yesterday )

I think I've slept about 20 hours this weekend, and I'm starting to feel caught up on sleep. Yesterday, after I finally woke up, Josh plopped me down in front of his computer and made me play Portal, which was pretty fun. And in the mean time, he made breakfast, cleaned the apartment, and made dinner. Aww. I feel a lot less stressed for having relaxed all day, and for the apartment being so much cleaner. I think today, since it's supposed to get up to like 42 out, we are going hiking... provided one of us actually finds somewhere interesting to go.

Portal is a really neat game. I'm crap at using the controls in first person shooter games, but for the most part it doesn't matter in this game. There were only a couple places where my clumsiness made things slow, but since there were no bad guys to shoot me, it didn't really matter. The narration is absolutely hilarious too. The puzzles were fun, but for the most part not all that hard... there were several that I got stuck on and decided, "I'll do something silly because that will be entertaining while I try to think of a solution" and the next thing I knew I was done with the level... because that silly thing WAS the solution. Anyway, I'm looking forward to finishing the game tonight.

Next time, don't wait until the night before to get online and find out that this is the last place where they actually require you to sort your curb side recycling. Sigh. And we really want them to take away all this varied packing material just as soon as possible!

Ugh. It's been a really really long week. So much to do. So much accomplished, yet so much more to do. I'm ready for a weekend. Um, yeah. Ha ha ha.

As mentioned previously, Josh and I spent much of last weekend de-clutter-ifying our apartment. We signed our lease for another year, but decided that we still wanted a change. What we decided on was swapping the bedrooms--the master bedroom in our apartment is huge (13 by 14, plus 3 closets), while the second bedroom is tiny (9 by 10). As a result, the master bedroom naturally became our junk room, while the second bedroom was a very claustrophobic office (not to mention that it gets bloody HOT in there with Josh's computer on over the summer). We've tried various methods in the past 2 years for making use of this small room, but none of them have we been overly pleased with. And the master bedroom is a problem too... because of it's junk room status. I went to a sleep talk recently at work about how you will sleep better if you reserve the bedroom for only sleep and sex (and especially avoid activities in the bedroom that might stress you out--like fighting with your spouse, or your crap), and I think that makes a lot of sense. The last thing I need while I'm getting into bed is for my eyes to wander over to a bookcase full of crap we don't know what to do with, because that can get me thinking about such things as "How are we ever going to handle having CHILDREN, when we can't even handle all the THINGS we have?" rather than drifting peacefully off to dreamland. Thus, sleeping in a room that is too small for storing junk seems like a pretty good idea. I think this is the same sort of thing as how you will supposedly score better on a test when you take it where you learned the material you are being tested on.

So yeah, we swapped the two bedrooms. Except bedroom #2 is so small that we can't actually put our dressers in there... so pretty much we now have a bedroom that has a bed and nightstands, and Josh's closet, and then we also have a office/sewing room/dressing room. We figure that this'll work pretty well when we have out of town guests over too--we'll let them sleep in our bed, and we'll sleep in the office on our camping pads, without getting cut off from anything we regularly need except for Josh's closet. And our guests will get to sleep in a real bed.

Furthermore, not only did we rearrange, but we were really diligent about de-cluttering as we went. So rather than just moving junk from one junk pile to the next, we went through it and made actual decisions about whether or not to keep it, and where to store it. As a result, we have a rather big pile of things to get rid of. And we now know where to find a lot of things that we have had for a long time, because they are organized now.

Our areas of accomplishment include:
- The junk bookcase that was in the bedroom
- The top of Mary's dresser
- The top of Josh's dresser
- Mary's desk drawers
- Josh's desk drawers (4 of which are now loaded with communal desk stuff, since Josh has the bigger desk--there is a writing implements drawer, a checks and batteries drawer, a envelopes/cards/stationary/stamps/address labels drawer, and a notebooks drawer.)
- Mary's closet floor
- Josh's closet in it's entirety (though there's still a box of my stuff--mostly knitting and beading stuff--Josh found there to be dealt with tonight)
- The cardboard box we tossed all our wedding stuff in 2 years ago when we got back from the honeymoon (it's a new box--the yellow one--now that is a little smaller and has a lid--also, though you can't tell, it's somewhat sorted.)
- Half of the bedroom linen closet
- The random crap mini-cabinet that used to be a TV stand (which now has electronics/software storage in the cabinet part, and desk supplies--stapler, hole punch, pencil sharpener, scissors, tape, paper, etc--in the above part that was probably designed for a VCR).
- The junk closet
- Under the bed
- Mary's nightstand (drawers and surface)
- Josh's nightstand (drawers and surface)

Anyway, I love love love our new office. It is huge, and it has a bigger chunk of unoccupied floor space than I've had access to since moving away from my parents' house--which will be excellent when it comes to cutting out sewing projects. Furthermore, it is clean and uncluttered. I know exactly where to find everything, and there isn't a bunch of crap about. Also, there is lots of space for projects other than sewing projects, such as cleaning/de-cluttering projects we've been handling recently. And we have new light bulbs, so it's bright and friendly in there. Finally, I think it will make a fine space if we ever want to have everyone we know over to our apartment and be able to split up for separate games or divided D&D sessions. We can set up our card table in there in a pinch (though we decided we shouldn't leave it set up in there in general because it's a junk magnet).

If I sound like I'm proud of us, it's because I am.

Voila!



Now, here's to keeping it clean and clutter-free being easier than making it clean and clutter-free in the first place! (...I hope...)

It has been an exciting afternoon at the Middendorf Manor. After single handedly slaying the nap monster, I joined forces with my valiant husband and together we took on the filing cabinet in unarmed combat and slew it. Casualties were high, but the world is indeed a safer place for it.

I am now the proud owner of the world's cutest coffee maker. It's got a little tiny 4 cup pitcher and fits conveniently in the dead space between the fridge and the dish drainer. Also, it has a timer mode, so I can set it up to start making my coffee before I get up in the morning... so I will have fresh hot coffee waiting for me when I get up in the morning! Now how's that for an incentive to actually get up when the alarm goes off? So I suppose it's not quite as good as having Dad downstairs making coffee in the morning when I get up, but it's certainly got some other advantages... like not requiring me to live with my parents. If I'd known such a cool device could be purchased for only $19.99, I would have gotten one of them years ago!

This morning, Josh and I rearranged our A/V stuff. We moved the stereo stack over to the far side of the room (where the speakers are and where the projector projects to, across from the couch). This involved unplugging everything, and then replugging everything, and more. Because before we were kind of lazy putting it together... we weren't planning to use remote controls, so we didn't do that stuff, we didn't do the equalizer, we didn't have a long enough composite cable to actually use the VCR, we weren't particularly successful at setting it up to do easy projection and sound from a computer, and we didn't set it up to actually work off one master power button. Well now, it's much more high tech. We can use the equalizer now, which means hopefully we don't need to choose between blasting the neighbors with over-loud movie music or not being able to hear the over-soft dialog. We can actually get picture as well as sound out of the VCR. We turn it on and off with one button now. We can use the remote controls with it easy, rather than doing the annoying bend-around-can't-see-a-damn-thing controlling of it we've had in the past... and hopefully this will be an improvement. And we now have cords coming out for plugging into a computer... which all goes through the VCR (DVD player doesn't have AUX-in as it doesn't record)... which unfortunately does degrade the quality as it is a crappy old mono VCR, but at least it's easy to set up. Also, we put the glass door on the stereo stack (and then took it immediately back off and cleaned it), so it looks much classier than it did before. Anyway, the whole thing took pretty much all morning, but it's done now... so yay!

Other accomplishments for today include a fridge audit, starting laundry, and vacuuming.

I'm also starting to think about what I'll be planting in my garden this coming spring. I'm seriously looking forward to gardening again.

Plans for tonight include going to REI to get Josh some biking shoes, sewing some button holes into a shirt for my sister, cutting Josh's hair, cleaning the kitchen (again), and hopefully finishing the leg work on a few last financial things from last year (if only the online banking at the credit union starts working again by tonight). Ah, what fun.

I don't think anyone has cleaned behind the fridge since this place was built. It was nasty. Like mouse and roche restaurant awaiting customers nasty. I guess I can be thankful for the "awaiting" part. Now, however, it is relatively clean. Perhaps we will tackle behind the stove one of these days... but not one of these days when we are baking stuff.

Camping this weekend...

To do before Friday:

* Call Sand Ridge and ask about hunting season info. Depending on the answer, some bright colors will need to be acquired... but I'm certainly hoping that will be unnecessary.

* Acquire maps and such.

* Make rain cover for my backpack.

* Seam seal Josh's rain cover... or better yet have him do it.

* Finish modular phanny pack pieces which are wanted for this trip. This will include the small water bottle holders and I think some pouches.

* Do that whole packing thing, and don't forget my pillow again.

* Make better stuff sack for camping pads.

* Purchase more fuel... of the Tange variety. Because where would we be without Tange?

I think I will have a busy next few evenings. Going camping always seems to require so much sewing prep work. I guess camping is kind of like getting married that way.