Kind of a followup to the previous entry...the other hand of it, if you will.

I did a LOT of cleaning this weekend. My living room space has become covered in craft crap over the last two months. I was busy/out of town for a good chunk of that, and too tired to give a damn about cleaning it for the other half. But I managed to unearth various pieces of furniture and put stuff away on Saturday. Good for me.

I've been having issues with my spare room for ages now. Mom keeps showing up and loading furniture into it, she refuses to get rid of the bookcase she bought unassembled and dumped the pieces of it on my floor. They also stayed unassembled on my floor for a year, and all of the furniture was too fucking big for me to lift even though I lift weights these days. After Ian moved out, I planned on having a craft room. But I ended up with a storage junk pit. Which is par for the course with my family, since we all acquire and get rid of nothing. George Carlin (RIP), a fellow Taurus, certainly knew what that's like.

Mom and Mauricio brought over totally random items that they apparently got off the street because the Free Sidewalk Stuff thing has finally caught on in my hometown. They buried this stuff in a corner, which was blocked off by the Bookcase from Hell, and I couldn't even GET to it if I wanted to use any of them. I can tell you now that they brought me a record player (huh? I have no records), ancient radio, a stereo (I already have one. Actually, I already have two but one is at her house...buried under more of her crap), an extra, presumably non-working, DVD/VCR player, speakers that are almost bigger than I am that they found on the street... and I was all, what the hell do I do with this crap? I don't even know how to hook it up, assuming I could even GET into the corner which is blocked by the Bookcase From Hell. And they were all, "But it's YOURS!" And when someone gives you something in this family, unless it is extremely awfully tacky, you don't freaking get rid of it. There is massive guilt if you want to throw out the damn greeting cards.

I also still had my old craft stuff (yarn stash, fabric stash, tools left over from design school that cost way too much to throw out even though I haven't used them since 2001), but it all ended up in an avalanche in another corner because guess what, they also got buried behind the Bookcase from Hell pile.

(Don't you sort of wish I'd taken a picture of this so you could get the sheer amount of mess this was?)

Merry has periodically said something to me along the lines of, "Sometime I'll come over and help you deal with that room." We eventually determined that yesterday would be that day. I took her out to a fancy lunch first :) The funny thing about this was, she's also a messy person and her place needed cleaning. But "it's easier to clean someone else's house than yours." Isn't that bizarre but true? God knows I can deal with cleaning the CC once a week a lot better than I can cleaning up my own stuff weekly. (For one thing, I don't have to figure out where to put everything. For another thing, 90% of what I do amounts to "sweep the floor.") Maybe someone needs to start a "Trading Houses" website where people who can organize others but not themselves can trade services. Or at least, I should send Merry over to Mom's house.

But she actually likes moving furniture, or at least can manage to pick it up. She moved the furniture about so that the room is actually accessible. She took away the speakers and record player/radio/stereo crap, since I said I would never bloody use it and she might as well hand it off to her kid or put it out on the street if he didn't want it. Yay. Even the Bookcase From Hell (which Mom has finally assembled, but left in the middle of the room blocking the light) has been moved out of the way and alongside a wall. Various storage crap Mom bought me and left on the floor was put to use to stuff fabric and yarn in, and then were put into the bookcase. It was a VAST improvement. I still have a box or two of random stuff to put somewhere, but the craft stuff is all contained in one bookcase now. The room is almost usable! Amazing!

Definitely not something I could remotely deal with alone. I got overwhelmed trying to think of where to put stuff just looking at the piles. But once there was ROOM to put stuff in places, it was doable. Huzzah.

On the rare occasions when someone can help, it's a good thing. Not a miracle one can always count on...but that shit was not getting done by me.

In other news, I hear there's a JulNoWriMo coming up. Some people in writer's group want to do it. Again, since I don't get some shit done while alone (sigh), I should really do it.

I actually intended to do a WriMo in June, except for the part where I went on vacation and didn't do any pre-planning in May and uh, yeah. June, other than having vacation, might have been a better month to do it than July really. But eh, July is probably not any better/worse for working than November ever is. They're both on a "work all Thursday, at CC class all Monday, variable Wednesday, who knows Tuesday" kind of schedule every year, and I somehow still manage to cram in around an hour or two of work per day.

I haven't been motivated to write for shit in months, though, which is a problem.

As for my schedule, Wednesdays and Thursdays are gonna be the same as usual. I've decided to take spinning class on Monday nights. I really don't have any interest in spinning, but I've taken everything else, I could do it for free, and I could work out beforehand. Tuesday nights will be gym nights so I can still get into the best weights class at the gym. I won't be taking juggling (that overlaps with weights), but I will wait to decide whether or not to take meditation until August. I gather I can't sign up for the class (they're having 2 "sessions" at the EC for some reason) until August anyway, and I'll have more money then, so I'll think about it.

I am also debating whether or not to take Mojo Flow then. My old dance teacher has his own studio now and renamed the class that, but he wants to run it 3 damn times a week, MWF nights. I am definitely not making that in July, but after spinning ends, I'll have Mondays free (and half of Wednesdays, and most Fridays), so I might as well go if I can show up to more classes than I'm missing. Again, something to determine during summer session 2.

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