s e v e n i s a j o u r n e y

So I’m having something of an organizational crisis involving three rooms – four, if you count the bedroom.

Warning, long boring thinking-out-loud session.

Bedroom: My clothes are there, in and around a dresser I have all to myself, and a closet I pretty much also have all to myself. Apart from figuring out a better way of dealing with the perpetually growing and shriking pile of Clothes That Are Too Dirty To Fold and Put Back, But Too Clean To Wash Without Wearing Again Once or Twice, this is working out fine. Also in there are my two largest jewelry boxes, which being on top of the dresser are a little too high. The jewelry from stashes in other parts of the house (more on that later) that I actually wear fairly frequently tends to migrate in here and get dumped in a snarl on top of the dresser when I take it off at night.

My Office: Has my big honking desk in it, a bookcase, and several bins of dance gear. The desk has my Mac on it, which is largely unused. The room has become, primarily, a dumping ground for dance gear, and secondarily, a dumping ground for whatever junk we’ve cleaned out of the rest of the house prior to having guests over. Also in here is some jewelry, mostly dance-related. The dance gear is in and out of several bins, a closet, and strewn on the floor, desk and chair.

The Living Room: Has no furniture, apart from some bookcases and the big cabinet I got from the basement of the Fogg, which is now very elegantly storing our CDs and videos. It has a few unpacked boxes still, the majority of which are my papers and notebooks and stuff, although there are a couple boxes of unpacked clothes, and — on top of some of the other boxes — the jumble of all my smaller boxes of jewelry. The living room is also where the comic boxes are stacked, like a wall of blocky white albatross.

The Dining Room: which we use as a living room. It has the TV (and therefore the Playstation), the only computer with a net connection (currently), the table, and it opens very conveniently onto the kitchen, so that if someone is puttering in the kitchen, they’re still in contact with the person/people in the dining room. (It also opens onto the conservatory, which is not so big a deal at the moment, but which is very nice in the summer). We both like being able to hang out in the same room in the evenings – one of us can be on the computer while the other is in the kitchen or watching TV or whatever.

So what I know I want:

– Better storage/organization/display for my skillions of jewelry boxes. Current plans are to keep an eye out for a piece of furniture to fit between the door to my office and the door to its closet, that I could stack jewelry boxes on top of, with drawers/shelves underneath for dance gear.

– Better storage/organization of dance gear/garb. See above. Note that in both cases, I don’t think a single piece of furniture of a size to fit on that stretch of wall would be big enough to handle everything I’d want to put on/in it.

– Storage, preferable accessible, i.e., not in the attic, for all of my notebooks and papers and stuff. My two desk file drawers are not big enough, and we’re just about out of book shelves. A combination of buying another bookcase and weeding our existing collection (which we’ve been meaning to do for some time) would free up enough space on the shelves in my office, I reckon.

– Furniture for the living room (see previous dilemma re: what kind of sofa to get). Note that it’s been really nice to have the living room be relatively open, for dancing or playing music, or cutting patterns.

– Someplace to sew.

– Some conveniently accessible place for the farm papers, so that they’re not entirely stashed away in Stephen’s office. The whiteboard calendar is currently on the dining room wall above the computer, which is good, because it’s right there all the time, however since the dining room is also a living/entertaining room, it might be asking too much to also make it an office. Or maybe not, I don’t know.

What I’m not sure I want:
– An office. I like hanging out with Stephen in the living room. I mean the dining room. Maybe we ought to call the living room the “den” or something, instead ? Or call the dining room the “common room” ? Anyway, when I *am* working on some project or other, it tends to involve stuff being strewn everywhere, and that can be a problem in the common room, because it gets in the way of everything else we do in there. On the other hand, that can be an advantage, because it means I *have* to clean it up, and not leave it strewn until the next time we have a party or something.

Okay. Running out of mental steam here. Stephen’s back from fighting & we’ve just had lunch, so it’s time to go out and play with the ‘paca some more.

After a failed trip to the local Wrightsons, which had exactly nothing on our shopping list of eight or so farming bits and bobs, we went out and played with the ‘paca. Stephen shifted our makshift catch pen (three gates set up to form a square with a section of the home-gallop fence as the fourth) to a flatter section of paddock & we rounded up the three boys with the aim of trying out some of the handling techniques I learned at the workshop I took at the conference last week.

It went really well ! Pointer, the shy one, was docile, if not especially willing. He reacted to the halter, funnily enough, a lot like Slow Top does when you grab and hold him against his will — he held still and stared sullenly off in the direction he’d prefer to be going. He didn’t seem frightened or upset, though, and I think he genuinely enjoyed having me rub behind his ears. Oak, who we’re pretty sure is the sort of critter Marty describes as a “control freak”, was a bit stroppier, but also quite a bit quicker to figure out what was going on and what I wanted. Once I got the halter on him, I felt quite confident enough to try taking out of the pen and leading him a bit. He tried tossing his head and reared up once or twice, but eventually figured out that he was attached to me and that following along really wasn’t that big a deal. Depending on how things go with Chris, Oak my be the first one who gets taken for a walk.

Chris’s session was a bit more traumatic — for us, not him. We’ve let his nails get overlong, and despite every caution to the contrary, we (I) got impatient and wanted to try and get at least the ends of them off right then. So instead of haltering, we tried just keeping him still for his nails to be cut. The combination of the soft ground and the inadequate clippers meant that we nicked his pads and then had to sting them more with some iodine we borrowed off Yvonne… Ack. Chris was remarkably patient with us, however, and seems none the worse for the experience. Plans are to do some more legwork with him today, to let him know, no really, he can let us mess with his feet and we *won’t* hurt them. Ack again.

After lunch, we set about lighting a couple more piles of gorse on fire. That went really well, despite a sudden rain-and-hail-squall sending me scampering back to the house for raingear. Mmmm, fire fun.

Then we showered up and went over to Steve and Jennifer’s for a scrummy dinner-and-hangout. A good day !