Feb 23, 2015

Madefy Monday

madefy ~ to moisten or make wet

I was sitting here last night trying to talk myself into doing this post (and trying to keep my eyes open at the same time) and then I remembered that I have an appointment in the morning. This meant that if I didn't have this post scheduled before I went to bed it wouldn't get done until almost noon.

So here I am. :-)

Last week was better than the week before, and the turning point seemed to come on Thursday. Thursday, for those of you who keep track of such things, was the Chinese New Year. I made up my mind that this year was going to be better than last year, and when it didn't start out that way I decided that my year wouldn't officially start until the Chinese one did. So maybe it was just co-incidence, but whatever. It works for me. :-)

As you know, I have cats. And they're a bunch of little weirdoes. How weird are they? They don't like boxes, they like caves. Specifically, they like caves made with a blanket draped over a chair.

The two biggest cave dwellers are Dante and Romi. Romi made his own cave by wriggling his way under the blanket I have over the futon in the workroom to keep the cat hair off, and he sleeps in it every day. Dante prefers a cave made with a throw over my recliner, but will grudgingly (for a couple of cat treats) use one made with the wing chair instead.

Now my husband's cat, Julius, has suddenly decided he likes caves as well, but only the ones Dante likes. I think he's doing it more to tick off his brother than anything else. Anyway, he beat Dante to the cave on the wing chair one night and was pretty smug about it. However, Dante learned passive aggressiveness from a master - his mother. Undeterred, he jumped up on the chair on the outside of the cave, and then sat on the lump under the afghan. And he stayed there until Julius gave up, then he moved in and went to sleep. If you look carefully, you can see Julius's nose sticking out of the cave.



Yesterday was almost a bad day, but purely self-inflicted. I started out in my office, thinking to clean it up so I might be motivated into getting some actual work done in it this week. But it was cold and the day was overcast, and then it started to snow . . .

But I pulled myself up by my bootstraps and started with something easy - shredding. I had a lot of shredding piled up, mostly all over my desk. I now have a large recycling bag full of shredded paper instead. :-)

While I was shredding I was also looking around my office. There wasn't a lot of stuff out of place, what was making it cluttered were the knick-knack collections all over the bookcases, and the overabundance of books. I really like my knick-knacks (except when it comes to dusting them) so that left my books.

After finishing the nook, I kind of slacked off on the whole book migration thing, so I decided it was time to start working on that. I'd start by moving some of my reference books upstairs to the giant bookcase in the upper hallway.

I've been putting this off because I keep thinking it's not going to be as convenient having these books upstairs. I like having them at my fingertips. Well, the Man, Myth, and Magic set can go up there because I have them in magazine format as well. And yes, I need them both. The hard copies are more convenient for looking weird stuff up, but the magazines have extra articles on the back covers. And the Planet Earth series from Time/Life can go up there because I've had these books for 20 years and I think I've only cracked two of them open in all that time.

I did have a before picture to show the semi-empty, dust covered bookcase, but you couldn't really see how badly it needed cleaning, so I'm just posting the after picture:



Obviously it's not done yet, but I've made a good start to it and hopefully it'll inspire me to clean up the bookcases in my office as well.

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