Best Laid Plans (1)

About a year and a half ago, I started cleaning out my mother’s house, and almost immediately learned that keeping stuff “because I might need it someday” or “because it’s too good to throw out” is a bad idea. Clearly, it’s time to dejunk my own home – but I had to finish my mother’s first. Days and weeks and months went by, and my husband and I kept filling up trash cans and lugging dozens of big black trash bags out to the end of her driveway to be hauled away. Over and over, I thought we were almost finished; we never were. As soon as we cleared away one mess, we found another hiding behind it.

But at last, when 2014 was almost over, the end seemed in sight. And I had such great plans. I knew exactly how I was going to spend the winter – at home, cozily busy indoors, discarding piles and piles of my unneeded, unwanted, unloved junk. Bags and boxes on top of bags and boxes, out the door and gone with the trash collectors. And when spring came, I was going to look back on months of accomplishment and look forward to a new, streamlined life.

So much for plans.

The trouble was, even after a year of work, I still didn’t realize how cluttered my mother’s house was. There was still stuff behind stuff, all sorts of stuff, three different types of stuff. Some of it, my parents valued but I don’t have enough room to store it or any desire to own it – but maybe someone else would. Then there were perfectly good things I don’t think they realized they had, like half a dozen can openers, ten or twenty or thirty years old (judging by the price tags), still in their original store packaging. (These first two categories were easy; they could be given away or sold.) And finally there was stuff, lots of it, that they might have valued once, and shoved out of the way someplace or other, and never touched again while it deteriorated and became unusable.

And I had no time or energy left to tackle my own mess. Instead, this house got more and more cluttered as we brought home boxes of papers – as many boxes as the back of the car would hold – that I didn’t have time to sort through while we were at my mother’s house.

So much stuff, and so little of it any use to anybody.

Will This Work, Part 4 – Amazing.

I’m amazed, anyway.

Last fall, mostly out of curiosity and also because I got really tired of the seams in my socks chewing into my toes (handmade socks don’t generally have those seams across the top of your foot), I decided to see if I really could knit a pair of socks.

At first, I wasn’t sure the cuff was big enough to let my entire foot through. (Fortunately, knitting  st  r   e   t   c  h es.)

Then I came to the part where the sock needed to make a right-angle turn, because that’s what feet do. The directions made no sense, no matter how many times I read them. Knit a heel flap? What’s that? Turn the heel? Turn it into what? It was all obviously impossible. But I was halfway done, so I might as well just keep going, row by row, doing what the directions told me to…and all of a sudden

I had a sock! And a while later, I had a pair of socks. And they’re so very very comfortable that I might just wear them every day if they weren’t the kind of wool you have to handwash and let dry lying flat (which takes a couple of days).

I wanna make some more socks!

Yesterdaily post: Talents I wish I had…

(With thanks to the one and only Rarasaur. Without her, I would have overlooked this WordPress daily post suggestion – “tell us about a talent you’d love to have, but don’t” – entirely. As it is, I’m only a day late…)

Oh, there are lots of things I wish I could do effortlessly. Draw. Run. Make my hair do what I want it to do. (We’ve come to an understanding, my hair and me. I  wash and brush it as needed and let it do pretty much what it prefers, and it sits on top of my head and points in various directions and smirks.) But none of those is the biggie, the talent I long to have and never expect to master.

If I only could get organized. (To the tune of that song from the Wizard of Oz, you know, the one the scarecrow sings. Or maybe each of Dorothy’s buddies gets a verse of his own. If I were organized, I’d know, wouldn’t I?)

But I’m not organized. I tackle all sorts of things…I write, I blog, I take photos, I bake, I knit, I, I, I get interested in a lot of stuff. Shiny! The world is so full of a number of things, as that poet, you know, Whitman, or Stevenson, or Plath, said. And I want to play with most of them.

Focus, I don’t got it. If only I could just set most of my mental toys gently but firmly to one side and concentrate on the most important. I’m not so sure that would work well, though.

How do you cope when you’re working hard on a project and reach a dead end, a puzzle you don’t see how to solve? Well, I need to concentrate on something completely different – then my mind wanders off exploring and comes back with solutions to unrelated problems. When I force myself to drive grimly straight ahead toward one goal, I wind up exhausted, depressed, and incompetent. When I keep juggling, sooner or later one of my problem balls hatches like a Czarist jeweled Easter egg…shiny!…and hands me an answer.

Maybe my best plan is to treat my mind like my hair: just learn to live with its quirks.

The clock is ticking…

…only fourteen and a half hours left of 2012. Sorry, fourteen and a quarter.

All right, let’s try for realistic plans for 2013. One thing I’ve finally learned over the past year (and about time, too) is that there’s a limited number of minutes in a day to get things done, and a limited amount of mental and emotional and physical energy to use for doing them. So it seems like a good idea to tackle only one large new goal at a time.

The two things that have to continue are writing and providing support for my mom. I’ll certainly continue with the weekly 100-word challenges – they’re fun, they’re good practice, and I enjoy seeing what other people come up with based on the same prompts. I’ll go on blogging regularly. And, above all, I’ll keep chipping away at the boulder of book-length fiction, trying to sculpt it into finished work of my own.

What should I tuck into the corners of the day around that central core? Probably the thing I want to do least: clean the horrible house, because the inconvenience and irritation of living in this mess is getting to me. And what that needs to start with is getting rid of lots and lots and lots of stuff – we own too many things to organize them all.

Once the mess is under control, I can free up time for regular exercise, something I’ve neglected lately. And make sure I’m eating good food, not junk. Will I lose weight? Probably not, but I’ll be healthier.

And, since at least one New Year’s resolution should focus on something you want to do, I’m going to finally make time for knitting experiments – trying out odd stitches and construction methods that I’ve read about here and there. Blog posts, yes, there will be blog posts. With pictures.

(And also, I’ll go on looking forward to posts from the many varied bloggers I follow. Some of you have become online friends, and all of you brighten my day. Thank you so much!)

Only one more day of 2012!

We’re staring 2013 in the face.

I don’t usually write about my problems here, mostly because I don’t have much that’s fresh and insightful to say about the subject. But the end of the year seems to be the traditional time to evaluate our lives and make plans to improve them.

And what did I accomplish in 2012? I started off with grandly overambitious plans – “finish writing at least two books; be thin; live in a tidy house; rebuild my savings account; learn to draw; and, for the heck of it, finish several reading challenges.” It’s been a sobering year.

My house is as messy as it’s ever been, possibly worse. I’ve gained five pounds. I don’t have the free time to concentrate on drawing. The reading challenges petered out midyear, largely because I found other topics to post about, so I don’t really care about that failure. Have I succeeded in anything?

My main accomplishment, one I didn’t realize I was facing a year ago, has been to keep my mother out of the hospital and the nursing home, living quasi-independently in her familiar house with her familiar belongings and as many of her familiar routines as she feels up to bothering with. And it’s stressful for everyone involved, and pretty time-consuming.

But what about my January pipe dreams? Well, there’s writing. Writing fiction is something I’ve made progress on. No, I haven’t finished two books in the past year. In spite of my high hopes a month ago, I haven’t even finished one; it turns out that my mother now gets very upset by the prospect of Christmas (with all the things she feels she ought to do and can’t do), so upset that soothing her leaves me emotionally drained for most of the day. So that will have to be factored into future plans: December is a washout.

Even so, I’ve learned a lot – partly by participating in Friday Fictioneers and the 100 Word Challenge for Grownups – about writing: structuring plots, developing characters, keeping a story moving. Well before spring I really should have the current fantasy-in-progress rough draft written. (Pause for cartwheels.)

The score for the year? I guess I’m keeping up with the absolutely essential top-priority things. Almost top-priority, not so good. Tomorrow I’ll inflict a post on you about where I go from here.

(On a different subject, I just got home this afternoon from a two-day trip – my husband and I decided to give each other a mini-vacation for Christmas. I think I’ve caught up on all the comments people made on my posts while I was away; I know I have dozens and dozens of your posts to read. I’m looking forward to them, but it will take a while to get through them all. You may still be getting comments in February 😉 )

So how am I doing, halfway through the year?

Recently Marge Katherine over at Inside Out Cafe (the home of No Comfort Zone) took stock to see how far she’s come toward meeting her beginning-of-2012 goals. How about me? Have I been bold enough to thrust my snout beyond the edge of my comfort zone and sniff the strange breezes out in the wide wild world?

Well, yes and no. Life caught up with me, as it so often does, and elbowed me into spending an unexpectedly large amount of time propping up my mother so that, for now, she can go on living (pseudo) independently. I remind her to take her daily pills; I nag her into keeping her doctor’s appointments; we (my husband and I) pick up her prescriptions, buy her groceries, pay her bills…it doesn’t end. And taking charge of her life certainly puts me far, far outside my comfort zone; but it hardly counts as one of the goals I wanted to achieve for this year.

Beyond that? I’m learning to be thrifty myself, and more usefully, I’m involved in a couple of projects at church to extend what help we can to people who don’t have enough. My house is as much of a mess as ever, but the outdoors is doing pretty well. And as usual, I’m fat.

Best of all, I’m learning to write. Daily blogging helps; so do the weekly writing projects at Friday Fictioneers and the 100 Word Challenge – both of them exercises in concise, vivid storytelling. And at last, after way too many false starts – I’m an expert on how not to finish a novel – I’m bulldozing my way through inventing a world with its history and politics and economics, and telling the stories of people who live there and have problems that I think are interesting.

Visiting a world I made up out of my own head? Now, that’s a worthwhile trip beyond my comfort zone.

Still Struggling to Prioritize Projects

And feeling pretty overwhelmed, too. So many things I want to do; so many things I have to do; so many things I’ve promised to do. The promises may have been too optimistic, but there are people trusting me to keep them. The “have-to-dos” may annoy and frustrate me, but neglecting them is, in various ways, self-punishing. (For example, if I don’t floss my teeth, at best my dentist will scold me again, and at worst I’ll have to face gum surgery.) The things I want to do – well, you could argue that they’re just self-indulgence. But what if they’re the things I am uniquely talented to do? What if they’re among the things I’m here to do?

That crashing noise you just heard was the spinning plates falling off their sticks and shattering. Again.

Time to reach beyond my comfort zone and try a new approach, and fortunately I stumbled across one recently. I was innocently reading CHo Meir’s blog Coffee, Cats, And Yarn when she started talking about much the same problem – though, having spent time as a paramedic, she formulates it in terms of triage. Now, I’ve heard of triage as a way of sorting out injured people to decide how best to use limited resources to treat them. Generally, it’s described as a three-way sort. There are the people who can’t be helped; at best, they get pain relief. There are the people who will recover if they get treated immediately, but will die or be permanently injured if they don’t; they get most of the time and medicines and treatment. Then there are the people who are suffering at the moment, but will recover whether they’re treated right away or not. It sounds grim, but simple.

As CHo Meir describes triage, it’s not quite so simple – but more useful. She says that you have to keep re-evaluating the situation. Yes, start by putting your resources to work on whatever needs immediate attention. But remember that other problems or projects might get more urgent after being neglected for a while. Take the time to recategorize everything regularly. Make sure nothing important gets ignored so long that it becomes a crisis.

“All things need your attention in the course of a day, just not at the same time,” CHo Meir sums it up. And this sounds like it may be exactly the kind of approach I need.

We’ll see.

The uncomfortable comfort zone

A couple of months ago, margekatherine at Inside Out Cafe challenged all of us to try something new, to take a step outside our own comfort zone. I don’t know about other people, but I’m using the No Comfort challenge partly as a self improvement, “let’s fix Sharon”, project.

And that makes the whole idea of my comfort zone kind of interesting (in the “interesting” = “really really awful” sense). Parts of my life are like a very tiny, hard to find, pebble in my shoe that keeps slipping under my foot as I walk and digging into the arch or the heel or getting caught between two toes. You’d think it would be worth the trouble to stop and get rid of it, but I don’t do it. I don’t want to be embarrassed by getting caught balancing on one leg with my shoe off. I don’t want to take the time. I don’t really think I’ll be able to track it down – it’s such a ridiculously small pebble! – and get rid of it for good. And after all, I’ve been walking on it this long. I’m used to it, sort of. I think I can just keep going in spite of the pebble, can’t I?

We only need half the table for meals – so the other half gets full

One of my most annoying pebbles – the one with lots of sharp edges – is housework. Specifically, getting things organized. You may think you’re bad at organizing, but I bet I’m worse. (And even if I’m not, I feel like I am!) So, this week, I want to celebrate a very awkward-feeling stumble away from my uncomfortable comfort zone. Many thanks to beverleysmith at January to December, who put up a post a couple of weeks ago that reminded me about Flylady with her baby steps for getting organized!

Clear (mostly) at last! Now to keep it this way.

Well, I’m starting – I’m not following Flylady’s entire program by a long shot, but I am keeping my sink empty and making myself find fifteen minutes a day to pick things up. I have a very very long way to go, but things are a little better.

I’m very much an organizing toddler, though. And it’s frustrating. 😮

How to solve a problem

I wouldn’t put my pocketbook in a dark corner like this where
it can blend in and be invisible, would I? It must hide on purpose. Right?

My pocketbook sneaked away and hid. It does things like that. And it’s really inconvenient and annoying when I need to get myself out the front door, but I can’t go without my pocketbook that has all my essential stuff in it, and I can’t go with my pocketbook, because it’s hiding again.

Well, I have a plan. It’s easy to hide when you’re a plain black pocketbook. But what if it was hot pink?

 

 

 

It wouldn’t be so easy to get away with things then!

 

 

Maybe a few neon green dots would help, too.

And how about blinking lights? Lots of little blinking lights all over. Oh, and why not a siren?

Okay. It might be just a little tiny bit ugly, but that’ll fix the lost pocketbook problem. So there.

😉

What IS a pack rat to do?

Add a table, chair, and shoe holders here? How?

Seriously.

One of my projects this year is to get rid of all the stuff in my house that we don’t use – sometimes because we can’t find it – and find ways that make sense to store the rest. And looking good would be nice, but let’s not boldly go too far from the household comfort zone.

Of course, one category of stuff I’ve bought far too often is books of advice on becoming organized. None of these books solved the problem; but is that the authors’ fault, or mine?

A reasonable guess would be that I’m more to blame than the people who write advice books. So I decided to take the first one I could find and spend a month doing everything it tells me to do. (FWIW, my source of decluttering wisdom turned out to be What’s a (dis)Organized Person to Do? by Stacey Platt. I’d call it a fairly typical specimen of this kind of book.)

The first chapter – “General Principles” – sounds promising. Alas, it’s only eight pages long, with lots of white space. Worse, Platt makes several good points but doesn’t seem to realize that some of us need advice on HOW to apply them. I especially like “Live within your space means”, but! I’ve been overspending my space (a Kindle’s nice, but I could still use a Tardis) for many years. I need someone to explain how to efficiently clear away the mountains of stuff – but I already know I can’t swallow the ruthless “just throw it out, you shouldn’t want it” approach that a friend tried to make me use.

(No, I’m not out of control enough to be entertainingly pilloried on one of those TV shows about hoarders. Just far enough out of control to make life way too complicated.)

Well, never mind. I’m going to follow the room by room advice if it kills me, and by the last page my home will be a showplace. Right?

Not so fast. Platt starts with the entryway, and wants us to organize that area with prettily matching hangers in the coat closet, a table or shelf to hold keys, cell phone, mail, and more, “containers for hats, scarves, and gloves; boot and shoe storage; a place to sit.” Suuure. I’ve got fifteen inches / thirty-eight centimeters of free space next to my front door. That’s not going to hold all that extra furniture.

And the four and a half feet (135 cm) wide floor space in my kitchen isn’t going to hold a butcher-block island and the kitchen table she suggests either. What was all that about living within your space budget?

I don’t mean to jump on Platt, or not very hard. Her book is typical of the genre. On the other hand, I’m not about to rush out and buy a bigger house so I can follow her advice.

I guess I’m on my own. 😦