Come Clean With Me

Don't panic, I'm not going to hand you a dust cloth. The cleaning I'm talking about is "get the piles out of sight," preferably neatly and in a way that I can find them again. Filling a box and sticking it in the basement makes the room look good, but leads to bouts of insanity when I'm trying to find something and don't remember that it's in a box in the basement.

I don't know if I'm going to have company this Christmas. That's always a good motivator. Even though our company is always family and I don't worry about their opinion--they know me pretty well by now. But I like them to have some place to put their belongings other than the floor.

No, this time the cleaning is for me. My tunnel vision, which allows me to not notice the piles, has gone on vacation. All I can see, everywhere, are piles.

If I'm going to have any hope of making progress here, I'm going to have to give it all my time, so I won't be writing a blog this week. You'll just have to look over my shoulder as I reorganize.

I inherited some nice covered serving dishes from my mom. I'd put them on the bottom shelf of the open kitchen pantry. But now I have the pleasure of my grandson visiting weekly. He's in an intensely curious phase, so I moved them to the guest room, which is where I am now.

These dishes need to go in the closet, which is rather full. I have two boxes of papers that should be in the file cabinet, but it's full. One drawer of the cabinet has the girls' school papers. One day I expect them to take these collections, so I could sort them into separate boxes for them. That would make room for the two boxes of files to go in the cabinet and the serving dishes in the closet. But ... where do the boxes of school papers go?

This isn't working. I turn to my collection of yarn instead.

I do a lot of knitting and crocheting and by the end of this spring I was running low on yarn. Online selections were very limited and when the stores opened, it was just as bad. Had the pandemic disrupted yarn production?

Finally, just before panic set in, I found an on-line offer for the yarn I prefer, at a good price, if I bought eight, one-pound skeins at once. That's a lot of yarn, but I will use it. Eventually. That eight-pack was all one color, so I ordered several, ignoring the fact that I would have to find a way to store this abundance. When it arrived, I looked at it for a week before figuring out that I could stack it in the corner between the end table and the wall.

I just ordered more. I needed other colors. I'm not sure if I can make the pile in the corner any higher. The bed has four big drawers that would hold a lot of yarn, but what can I do with the stuff that's in them now?

I give up.

I'm going to make some popcorn and watch "White Christmas."

You're welcome to join me.