the light, it’s bright!

Done. Finis. Twenty-eight manini things in twenty-eight days. There is light at the end of the tunnel. And there is lightness in having twenty-eight fewer things hanging out on my to-do list for far too long.

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I finished the till closets on Wednesday. (“Till” comes from Aunt Donna’s word “tilly” for the utility room — kind of like a mudroom/laundry room/storage room.) Ours is the room between the garage and the foyer; it used to be the laundry room before the previous owners moved that upstairs. They replaced the laundry machines with six floor-to-ceiling cabinets, which is really handy since we have no basement.

The downside is that this is also the cat box room, so the litter dust tends to accumulate in every nook and cranny if you don’t keep up with it. (We don’t keep up with it.) Stuff has to be sealed up very well in plastic or washed down thoroughly whenever it’s taken out, so we tend to keep infrequently used stuff (spackle, paint cans) or stuff that is used so often the dust doesn’t have time to accumulate (cat food containers, cleaning supplies) in there.

Things had been frolicking behind closed doors and it was a bit of a mess, so Wednesday afternoon I went cabinet by cabinet — including the giant one under the utility sink — and took everything out, wiped it all down, wiped the cabinets themselves, sorted through the stuff, and put it all back in a more organized way. This of course involved a trip to Target for a few plastic boxes and storage thingies that fold open and make drawers for cabinets to contain rags and the wobbly lightbulb mountain (I’m hoarding, because I have yet to find a fluorescent I can stand).

Three hours later, it was clean and organized and ready to go. I even put out the new rug and changed the burnt-out lightbulb in one of the fixtures. Done.

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Yesterday was the marathon day: front closet, hook hanging, office cords, plant potting, and class planning.

The front closet wasn’t too bad. The biggest thing was just figuring out what was in there, other than my packaging supplies, which I always have to fight through other stuff to get through. I hate stuff piled in front of other stuff, so the goal was to get everything confined to the shelves across the back and leave the floor space for only that one giant rug, the carpet cleaner, and the boxed Christmas tree (which I haven’t put up in nearly ten years and really should get rid of, but I just can’t bring myself to do so yet).

Problem discovered: I had crammed four giant boxes of paper crap into the back of that closet. Two of them still had labels on them from when I moved back to the mainland. In 2002. (For the math-challenged, that’s eleven years ago.) A quick peek inside revealed stacks and stacks of email printouts (WTF, right?), most of them about ancient book projects and/or from people I haven’t spoken to in a dozen years. One box was every single scrap of paper that ever crossed my desk in relation to my high school reunion (I used to be the reunion chair). I quickly flipped through, pulled out the obituaries, one copy of each of our directories, and a very few other things, and put the rest aside for our next city shredding day in May. The final box looks like some more reunion stuff but also some old financial files; I’ve set that one aside as one of my March projects.

After getting those out of there, there was room for everything else only one layer deep, so all I had to do was some simple rearranging. Done.

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Then it was time to hang some hooks. My closet is generally pretty well organized, being a wall of cubbies and adequate (if not extensive) hanging space. Still, I wanted to hang some hooks for my scarves and belts and my few most-worn necklaces. The hooks for my scarves I’ve had for a while; I pulled them out of my first house, two houses ago, in fact. A couple months ago I bought some smaller ones for jewelry and belts, but just never got around to hanging them up. Fifteen minutes with the drill and done.

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Since I had the drill out, it was time to wrangle some cords. Several weeks ago I ordered some cord management supplies from Ikea; they showed up last week. I hung two of those wire suspender puppies from the underside of the desk, then even mounted the main multiplug surge thingie from one of the legs of my desk table.

There is still some work to do here — it likely involves an electrician to put some additional plugs where they’re actually needed — but for now, the only cords still on the floor are those going from the surge protectors to the wall, and one Ethernet cable that snakes all around the edge of the room to the printer. Computer cabling is not my department, however, so I’ll have to leave it to Awesome Husband to figure out if there’s some way to eliminate it or move it or something.

In the meantime, I’m going to think about getting some of those cord tubes to go along the baseboards to conceal what’s left. Done.

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Plants: I got ’em. Lots of ’em. I take cuttings, and the table that hold the cuttings while they root has been overflowing. During my Target foray earlier this week, I picked up some fresh potting soil [omit embarrassing story about lifting the bag out of the cart onto the belt and the whole thing ripping wide open and spilling potting soil absolutely EVERYWHERE]. I almost always have some extra pots lying around, so I gathered up a few that would be appropriate and went to work. Thirty minutes later, three new plants potted, watered, and placed, and a few new cuttings taken of other plants to get started for my mom. Done.

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So, on the last two items, I cheated a little bit, but I’m going to count them as done anyway.

Part of my quietude here lately has been the result of almost a year spent thinking really hard about what I want to do with myself and my time. As much as I think the idea that everyone should focus only on one thing is a steaming crock of crap, I have realized that I do have too many irons in the fire, and something has to give.

Teaching classes and workshops takes a TON of time, between coming up with projects, making multiple samples, taking photos, writing up instructions, figuring out and ordering supplies, making up kits, packing up all the tools and supplies and hauling them to class, setup time, cleanup time, and putting everything away when I get back home — for which I get paid a rather low hourly rate for just the time spent actively teaching in the classroom (i.e., two hours, in most cases).

This doesn’t even account for the fact that I have to order enough supplies to be prepared for having my maximum number of students, which is typically three times my minimum, and classes are just as likely to have the minimum as the maximum. Those supplies are often not things I use with regularity, so I get stuck with the extras.

At an event last fall, I was cornered and begged to teach again at a place I used to teach, but I never followed through. I’ve been asked to teach at another place I just adore, but have been stalled on coming up with projects that would work in that space and with their product mix. The last several times I’ve had a class cancelled at my regular teaching gig, I’ve found myself feeling a little relieved. This is all telling me something.

It’s weird, because I love to teach, but lately it just hasn’t been doing much for me. So, I’ve decided that after my spring session of classes, I’m going to take a hiatus from teaching. It might be a few months; it might be a year; it might be longer than that. I’m not sure.

The outcome of that as it relates to my February list is that I really didn’t have to make either a formal packing list or a spreadsheet for extra supply costs, and so I didn’t. What I did, do, however, was gather up my scribbled packing lists from the top of my workbench and put them in a folder along with my last supply cost list, on which were noted the relevant metals prices. This way, when (if?) I do come back to teaching, the raw material will be there to create the lists and the spreadsheet.

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Whew. This entry has been almost a novel, hasn’t it? Is this the time to mention that I found this whole exercise to be a great load of fun? (Seriously.) To reveal how wonderful it felt to plow through some of the crap that’s been taking up space on my lists and in my head for far longer than it should? To say that I think I might like to do this again sometime? Maybe not in a thing-a-day format — I don’t think I have enough little things left to do that — but maybe one larger project per week? I’m going to take March to noodle on that for a bit and see what I can come up with.

It’s been nice to have this space to come back to, for some accountability and for nudging me to get back into the groove of semi-regular writing again. Thanks for sharing Manini February with me.

Onward to March!