Christmas Eve 2021

Here’s hoping we ALL get what we want for Christmas!

All the best, my patient friends.

Merry Christmas!

Closet Organization

The past couple of months have been a crazy race against time, pivoting between multiple tasks to take best advantage of the circumstances of each day: frantically painting while temps were above 50º, demolishing and replacing doors while the weather was dry, purging the basement while the rented dumpster still had room… it’s been a wild dance, with practically NOTHING getting done outside of the Focus Du Jour.

One of the side effects of cramming 96 million different home projects into 2 months is that you end up making a lot of large reprioritizations and small short-term shifts. (Like, “X can live here until I finish Y, at which point, I’ll move Q out of Y and into S, which will leave room in Y to hold X, until I finally work my way through B and can create my new H, which will hold…” etc., etc.)

Or maybe that’s just me…?

But the hectic flurry is finally settling down (at least for the duration of the holiday season) and I have begun the process of acclimatizing to the new configurations inside my house. Overall, I’m fairly satisfied. There are some spaces that need reorganization, some want a few minor tweaks, and most are OK. Ocasionally, I even stumble across a happy accident - some space I created that serves a purpose I didn’t even know I needed.

Even if that space is just a closet…

Since last April’s “winter to spring” seasonal clothing shift took place during a major bedroom renovation, cold weather items got stuffed wherever I could find an empty spot, with a mental note to “sort that out next fall.” (“Look, Ma! I made myself more work!”)

Well, now it’s fall, and I need my warm clothes, TYVM. The weather gods took pity on me and didn’t force the issue until late November, but force it they finally did. I spent the week before Thanksgiving unearthing all my forgotten hiding spots and going through the dreaded annual ritual of Trying On Last Years Clothes.

Fortunately, not everything was a disaster - plenty of things still fit (mirabile dictu) but there remained a few items that disappointed me. Gradually, it began to dawn on me that all the pieces that need to be put away again for a while (in hopes that they’ll stretch with age?) came from the same place (the wardrobe in the guest bedroom) and I found myself musing, as I rejected yet another item, “This will have to go back into The Closet of Optimism…”

Then I realized what I’d thoughtlessly muttered, and began to laugh.

Not a Closet of Failure, not of Disappointment - but Optimism.

Hope and laughter.

Apparently, my subconscious has many ways of providing what I need!