Lucky

"everyone whose life you touch is lucky"

Last weekend I was finally motivated enough to undertake the task of trying to straighten out the house. It has been over two years since it was taken over by the leftover contents of my store, and even though I gave it a go of setting up shop here, it was essentially useless. It has now been months... months... and I just could not tackle anything. At all... Oh... I have previously attended to impromptu tidying up of the kitchen, but that never lasts long, and it is the most lived in room, so it doesn't really count. It gets done out of necessity. Anyways, it has only been a few days since I began this overhaul and I can't even remember which room I started in. One thing I do know is that the room that I started in is not the room that I ended up working on. Somehow I got sidetracked and cleaned up the bathroom and then ended up in the dining room/office space sorting through business paperwork, getting rid of wholesale catalogues, sorting through the table-desk-catchall, sifting through two tables full of books, and other miscellany, throwing things out, sweeping, inhaling dust and dried lavender along the way, and basically moving things around to other places. It had all seemed overwhelming before, and in some respects it still is, as I have only completed half the dining room. It is less than 8' by 13'. You'd be surprised how much stuff you can fit in such a small space, and that doesn't even include collected items in there that are in order and tidy. Last night I didn't stop until about 3AM... I finally cleared off the table-desk space and moved a smaller sofa table to the spot it had occupied below the window. The small two tiered table I had nestled underneath the desk, housing the wireless gateway thingy and other miscellaneous items no longer fit, so I had to come up with an alternative. A half-moon table I had seemed as though it would fit nicely... Just barely... a scant half inch to spare. Lucky. Anyways... you can see a lot more floor in the dining room... the downside being that I now have two kitchen tables sitting in the kitchen. If my hips were an inch bigger, I wouldn't be able to navigate my way through there. I have a feeling that that extra table I had been using as a desk probably won't work out in the tv room for the same purpose, unless I come up with another plan for the other stuff in there. Hmm... and I still have to figure out what to do with the printer that has been sitting on the kitchen table since I got it. Turns out that the little wire shelf I had been using in the dining room for storage and which I had designated for printer duty was not deep enough. Poo. On the upside, I found out that that shelf fits nicely in the tiny bedroom closet.

I had been making my way through this crap for three days and was planning on doing some more tonight after the regularly scheduled sporting activity. However... I decided not to... I figured I'd take a break and sort through a small bag that contained a few envelopes of photos from some time in the late 90s. I had looked through them quickly when I found the bag and knew that I would want to scan some in. Anyways... in a small envelope there was a photo that someone had taken of our old cat, together with a drawing by my niece, probably from when she was about three or four.

It was a drawing of her Grandma smiling. As I was pulling out stuff from the bag, I found another envelope with the word "Mom" on it in my writing. I looked at it wondering what it could be. In it there was a card that had on the front "everyone whose life you touch is lucky." Inside were the words... "(including me.) merry christmas" To which I had added "Mom". Underneath, I put "From (me) 2000". (When I used to write poems and draw, I always used to put the date and time. When I did cards I used to put the year in.) She died on December 11 of that year. I vaguely recall on that day that I was getting stuff ready for Christmas. The sentiment in that card still stands to this day and I know that my niece, who even though only four when mom died, agrees.