Cleaning Break

I am taking a slight pause in the house art tour to mention that I finally made some decent headway on straightening up the back room, which was extremely cluttered.  I definitely have some issues with letting things go, though I don't think I am a full-fledged hoarder.

Anyway, I was having some people over for a BBQ last night, and they needed to be able to get from the deck to the kitchen (and bathroom...).  So this meant I had to buckle down and make real progress on cleaning up.

The next photo is actually the state of the room when I was mostly done, not when I was starting.  You have to imagine over on the left a row of banker boxes, piled high with old newspapers (some from over a year ago, which may speak to some hoarding tendencies after all) and then a stack of books and DVDs to the right.

 
At this point, I had relocated the boxes and stacks and just was dealing with the residue, trying to sort and discard what I no longer had any use for.

This is how far I managed to get to by the start of the BBQ, so a substantial improvement, though still a bit of clutter here and there.

Now it is not all sweetness and light, as I still need to go through the newspapers (currently in the basement!), but I think mentally it will be easier to devote a couple of hours each week to tackling these stacks, and then perhaps taking on a storage room in the basement, which is an absolutely disaster right now.  I would say that it should be easier to get other work done in the office now, and I can maybe finally settle down to transcribing all the bits and pieces of my planning agency epic, which I typically write out during trips to the Rex.

This is the computer desk area after this clean up (again, still on the cluttered side, particularly at the desk itself).

You can just see a new woodcut print that I picked up at TOAF.  The full image, 'Nido' by Antonio Gomez-Palacio, is below.  (Nido means den in Spanish, which is certainly appropriate...). As you might imagine, the combination of books and books and books and a cat lazing around in a chair was irresistible to me.

Antonio Gomez-Palacio, Nido, 2025

The BBQ itself was fun, though a couple of people from the office weren't able to make it.  I also invited people that I used to work with, and fortunately a handful of them were able to make it.

Here we are at the end of the evening.