Spring Cleaning: better late than never, and maybe not even late

Spring in Montana, taken Thursdsay morning from the front porch. While still in my jammies.

I'm finally catching the spring-cleaning bug. Some years I remain immune, but this year, not so much. I thought perhaps I had escaped, since spring was finally in the air, but then it snowed several inches this week, so it feels like I'm getting a do-over for the beginning of the season.
 So far I have managed to clean out exactly one (of two) junk drawers in the kitchen, and I spent about ninety minutes organizing in my office at church. I do, however, have designs on considerably larger undertakings: the entire master bedroom, the garage, the front-room closet which is full-to-bursting with all kinds of amazing things.
The church rummage sale was a couple of weeks ago, and I'd managed to keep my new year's goal and put a thing a day in the rummage sale box. That helped, but there's still plenty to do. And plenty to pass on to someone who could use it more than we do. There is a new "giveaway" box in the bedroom. So far the hubs has made the only contributions.
Part of my hope for spring cleaning isn't just physical, but mental, too. I'm feeling a need for some new patterns of thought and organizing time. Not necessarily that much more structure, but new. And I'm hoping to get on top of some digital clutter, too. As I write this, my personal email account has 2,676 new emails in it, not counting the 23 which hotmail has identified as junk. The total number of emails in my inbox, which either have not been read or not been put in a folder, is 5,085 messages. Surely that's one or two emails more than I need.



Mother Nature's mixed-messages

Missing a Few

Well, a month of daily, consecutive blog posts has eluded me once again. There you go.
Once I missed the first post, suddenly it wasn't so urgent to write every day. Of course, last week we were at my parents' house two states away, and a daily post meant staying up later than was helpful each night (I took along a novel that never even made it out of my bag!).
Our annual Thanksgiving vacation was good: spending time with family and friends and hitting a few favorite haunts always feels just right. I could have tacked a few extra days onto our vacation with great gladness, but it also feels really good to be home. What is it about sleeping in your own bed - even if no one in the house sleeps very well, as last night - that feels so good?
We arrived home late-evening yesterday, and hit the ground running. G got the car unloaded (we came home with WAY more stuff than we headed west with, after more shopping than we should have done...) and I got the first load of laundry into the washing machine. This morning we all overslept after our night of horrible sleep, and I got to the office about 10am, was home for 45minutes of lunch, and didn't get home again until close to 8pm. G got to church for the first Advent midweek soup supper (he even made soup this afternoon!) and then led Evening Prayer and got home just as I was putting the Munchkin to bed.
 Of course we didn't manage to get the house very clean or tidy before we hit the road 10 days ago, so there's still plenty of work left to do around here. My hope is to get all the autumn decorations put away and the first Advent decorations up before the end of the week. We'll see... If the tidying and cleaning get done, and I can get the advent wreath out and the mantel "done" I'll feel pretty good...

What's the state of Advent/Christmas decorating at your house? How ambitious are you this year?

Oh, and before I forget: as promised, Santa Picture #39

My sister's family and my family. The tradition lives!
Too bad the little ones weren't happy about it!

I Know Where She Gets It

Today the Munchkin did a new trick: after emptying the little basket we have our random assortment of coasters in, again, she put. them. back. in. She didn't quite get all of them back in the basket, but I'm not complaining. It's so fun to watch her figure things out, and she was so proud! She held the basket out for me at a full-arm stretch and a goofy grin on her face.
The Munchkin's momma (that would be yours truly) had a bit of an "aha" this evening. I spent about 90 minutes sitting on the floor in our bonus room, sorting through bin after endless plastic bin of photos, rubber stamps, paper ephemera saved (and some even purchased!) for future uber-artsy collage projects. And when I got up, I saw exactly where the Munchkin gets her Entropy-Girl skills. In my experience, such sorting always makes things look worse before they look better, and there was a momma sized empty space surrounded by piles and bins, a recycle bag and a garbage bag. I didn't take a photo- the evidence would be far too embarrassing. But you can get the general idea here:

Increased entropy achieved, the Munchkin moves on to new targets.

Super Power Revealed

The Munchkin's super power has been revealed in our home: entropy. The girl's got serious skills in chaos-creation (and it's not like G and I are the king and queen of order, tidiness and a-place-for-everything-and-everything-in-its-place). BUT - we do have a handful of containers intended to keep a few things in certain spaces. There's a basket under the end table into which we put the daily paper and junk mail before it all gets schlepped to the garage; there's a big wicker basket for all the kitchen laundry (our laundry room is upstairs, the kitchen is downstairs, and we generate an insane amount of kitchen laundry with cloth napkins, bibs, towels, washcloths, etc.); and we have a small bookcase in the kitchen filled with cookbooks. The Munchkin can systematically, and with great stealth, remove the contents of all of these containers in no time flat.

Entropy-girl. That's my daughter! (pictures forth-coming, I hope).

Simple Steps

Sometimes simple steps aren't so simple. Or, perhaps more accurately, simple steps aren't always that easy. At least not in our house. Here's what caught my eye today, every single time I came in the front door or had to go upstairs.

Naked stairs!

They are the stairs in our house, and what's different about them is this: there's nothing else there. For pushing 30 hours now, the stairs have been completely clear of anything needing to go upstairs, go out into the garage, get recycled, or generally find some sort of more permanent home. I'd say it's been close to 6 months since this has been the reality in our house. I just got used to walking past all the piles. I got used to putting things down and picking them up again, at whatever stair-height seemed convenient. I nearly broke an ankle and dropped the baby on more than one occasion. And now I can't stop looking at all that naked carpet.
I wonder how long this will last?