Catching Up

I haven't been posting much lately. Bunch of reasons. I've been having trouble for awhile getting online at home. Our wireless modem is in the basement, and though I can get a good signal there, I can't anywhere else in the house. Greg thinks the netbook's antenna is just too weak. I don't know - I used to be able to get online from anywhere in the house and even outside, and I still can early in the morning like this, when I'm the only one awake. As soon as he gets up and fires up his computer, I can no longer maintain a signal. I argue that his computer is hogging it all. Regardless, I may be fixing it - I ordered a USB wireless booster antenna this week from Amazon, so hopefully that'll help.

But since I got the Droid, I don't even fire up the computer nearly as often as I used to. I use the Droid for everything - I am madly in love with that phone. I know I can email blog posts directly from the phone, but I haven't done that as much as I thought I would. While the slide-out keyboard works great, it is tiring to use it for long ranty posts like I tend to write.

It's been Purge and Sort month. The mess this place was becoming was finally on my last nerve, so I rented a dumpster a couple weeks ago. It was the smallest one they have (though still decent sized) and we completely filled it up. What a wonderful feeling! It was great to clear out so much crap from this house. There is much to be said for letting go of the old, to make way for the new.

I've always been a huge proponent of not cluttering up your space. I know you wouldn't know it to look around here, but that's the problem - the clutter here drives me to distraction. I hate it!! But the last 5 years have taken a toll on my clutter policing. Having someone move in with me, with all their stuff, was one thing; then there was the necessary emptying out of my mom and dad's house which happened way too fast, without time to really sort through things and think about them, or deal with getting rid of them. I kept way more stuff from there than I should have, simply becauase I felt too rushed to make a snap decision.

But that was okay - because while I had to live with a lot more clutter for a few years, it gave me time to mentally come to terms with getting rid of some of it.

That dumpster purge was one of the best things I've done in a long time. And I didn't throw away "everything" - I kept things that were important to me, or even a few things I was still unsure about. Just the stuff that I looked at and said "Why in the hell do I have this?" went away. It's been great to free up both the physical and mental space, to be able to now have room for the things that actually matter in my life.

The Imaginarium benefited the most from the purge. Like at the old house, the upstairs had become the dumping ground for stuff we didn't know what else to do with. So it was extraordinarily trashed, and that was where my 'hobby area' was - making it nothing more than an exercise in frustration to try to do anything up there, fighting through junk and stuff in my way just to work on a simple project.

Since cleaning it out, I'm far more enthusiastic about spending time up there and working on projects. In fact, I made two chemises for Pennsic last week, and it went great - easy, and fun. It really made me want to start sewing again. That's another long-lost hobby that often gets side-tracked because in both this house and the old house, the sewing area was relegated to the least used, most out-of-the-way area of the house, which also by default became the junk storage area ... so my sewing area was usually so junked up that by the time I'd clean it up enough to do anything, Iwas too tired or frustrated or out of time.

Not anymore. This house is big enough, with a dedicated 'hobby area' in the Imaginarium, that I'm not letting that happen again. After Pennsic I plan to devote some time to starting to fix up the things about the Imaginarium that are still bugging me - it needs better lighting, and the cabinet doors need painted, as all that dark wood makes it look dim and dreary up there. And I plan to do a lot more sewing.

I want to make more garb for Pennsic - I desperately need new garb, but as usual waited till too close to Pennsic to make any more this year. I say every year I'll do this over the winter, and never do, but I'm hoping this year will be different.

I also want to make some quilts. I've been wanting to do that for decades, and never gave myself the time or space to do it. That, too, is changing.

And I want to start making my own mundane clothes as well. That's something I began learning how to do a few years ago, and was really enjoying it, but life went all splodey and I never got back to it. That's back on the agenda this winter.

I haven't abandoned my A&S 50 Challenge projects, either ... they've just been on hiatus. I hope to start back on those after Pennsic as well. I'll probably never complete all 50 at the rate I'm going, but it's still fun to learn and try new things.

I'm participating in that age-old ritual of choosing a bunch of classes I want to go to at Pennsic, that I'll probably never make it to. But I got the class list online and have been going through it. There are lots of classes for skills I'd need to learn for my chosen A&S 50 projects, so it would be a shame not to take advantage of that opportunity.

Some years I really look forward to Pennsic, some years I am kind of 'meh' about it ... this is one of those years when I'm really looking forward to it. I can't wait!