weekend mania

Things accomplished: took pocketmouse to Ikea, hit Target and HT so all groceries are got.

I shall now deal with bills, shredding, trash and recycling, while I've got the energy. Possibly I will also vacuum, but we'll see. I may lie down instead. :-)

hrm.

Something's got to be done about my storage closet. I may need to go back to Ikea. Twice in one day, what's that all about.

Also, how on earth do I have no chlorine bleach in the house?

the right brain of the single woman

So the issue with my front closet was really only a little bit that some stuff was living there that had no business there (some of my stuff, I mean - not that critters were nesting in there, not at all), and mainly that the stuff that does belong in there has not been arranged to best use the space in the whole year+ I've been here. Specifically, it's the tools-and-whatnot "drawers" that had got really out of hand; when I lived in Charlottesville, that stuff was all in one drawer, and when I left that apartment I swept that drawer into a box, and I swear to god the stuff has been in that box ever since. Which is more than five years. And along came another box recently. So, two boxes that I'd been calling my tool drawers - no good.

I'm aiming to get some little self-contained drawer-unit things to put in the built-in shelves in that closet, but first I'm dealing with the "drawers" of tools, and separating them to see what I've got and what kind of dividers I'll need and so on. But I can't quite make myself the kind of person who has one little drawer for inch-long screws, one for inch-and-a-half-long screws, little cubbies for the different sizes of nails, and so on. I know this will bite me on the ass later when I try to put a #8 screw in a #14 anchor, but for now I'm doing okay with the following sorting system:

• electric tools and their paraphernelia (e.g. drill bits, which are not themselves electric, but obvs. that's where they go)
  
• all tools that are in no way electric - hammer, regular screwdrivers, all the eight zillion hex wrenches one accumulates
  
• turning things, i.e. all hardware with or relating to threads, so screws and anchors and screw-in hooks and so on
  
• banging things, i.e. nails and brads
  
• picture wire, of which I apparently have miles
  
• sticky things, i.e. glue and fasteners and all the kinds of tape, and I'm putting padlocks in that stack as well
  
• cords and cables

I am very pleased with this system.

that's the thing about progress.

So my front closet is two-thirds empty, and stuff is in tidy heaps there and around the "dining" room. The guest room is a disaster, because I took it into my head to get through some of the shit that's been in boxes for (literally) years, and have managed to decant quite a lot of it, and some has been marked for disposal, some consolidated, and some ready to be stored in a more sensible way going forward. Not ditching the empty boxes just yet, because after all, that might be where some stuff ends up. :-)

I wish I thought I'd be able to make something reasonable out of the guest room closet. That really would be a triumph.