Nope, Not Feeling It.

I'll be totally honest.

I've kind of been thinking of taking a long-term hiatus from this blog. Blogging has been a good outlet for me for 10 or more years but lately, I'm not feeling it.  I still have a lot of opinions on a lot of things, but sometimes I just feel to damn lazy to back my opinions up with facts.  The kids are getting older, and they read and stuff now, so my ability to blog about them and their cute little foibles is becoming limited, because as they get older, they have more to expect in privacy.

Blogging has changed as well. I don't see the same kind of communities of commenters as I once did, and now it kind of feels like screaming into the void.

But, I suppose, I like having the outlet here. I like thinking that someone out there cares what I have to say.

Today marked the two year anniversary of my surgery, and I'm kind of bitter-sweet about it.

I don't miss my colon much.

I'm glad to still be alive, and functioning at about 90-95% of what would have once been considered normal.

I'm fat as fuck again, but I'm mostly okay with it.  Buying pants is bullshit, though.

I'm anxious a lot.  I get scared as hell sometimes.

Maybe I'll keep writing, and just stop promoting it. Maybe I could just make this a place to scream into the void.

There's a common theme amongst cancer survivors.. a lot of talk of Living Life To The Fullest™and Making Every Day Count™. It makes me angry, because it's such a privileged position to take.  I mean, it's a nice life, if you can afford it.

I still have kids to feed, a (ever-so-slowly crumbling) roof to keep over our heads, and a car to keep on the road.

Living Life To Your Fullest™sounds pretty good on paper, but the vision of quitting your day job and following your dreams is only realistic when it's built on three things: Money, Time, and Energy.

Once I had Time, and Energy, but no Money.

Now I find I have little Money, little Time, and only so much Energy to go around.

So, I get angry.  Once upon a time, I looked at where I was and said "It's cool, I've got my whole life ahead of me."

Now, I'm not so sure. I may not have another 10 years. I may have another 50.

Maybe. Possibly. Hopefully.

And here I stagnate, wanting to Live My Dreams™ and Make Every Day Count™, but there are mouths to feed and bills to pay and at the end of the day, I am lucky if I have the time and energy to type a few words, pick up a guitar or a paintbrush, or even stay awake through a full episode of Breaking Bad.

LottoMax couldn't come soon enough.

Are you there, Void? It's me, Andrea.

The organization ain't really organized

I have been spending the last few days attempting to, in internet parlance, unfuck my habitat.

Okay, to be honest, I just discovered that site when I was Googling "Unfuck Your Habitat" in an effort to properly credit whomever came up with that term.  I think I'm going to need to look into it a bit further.

But at any rate, my general impression of the concept was basically doing the little, and sometimes big, things needed to keep the domicile from being a giant clusterfuck of hopelessness and disorder.

That being said, I've been engaging in the re-arranging of cupboards and drawers, filing of receipts, and purging of stuffs and whatnots.  Frankly, there hasn't been quite as much purging as I had hoped, but I can't win them all. 

I've been visiting Pinterest again in hopes of picking up some DIY home organization tips, but I find a lot of the stuff involves a lot of resources I don't have on hand.  I did try this tip, which I had been curious about for some time, regarding folding T-shirts for easy access.  This is what I ended up with:

I am physically incapable of throwing out T-shirts.

Compared to the tutorial:

It's not a bad system.  The pictures on the original post exaggerate the amount of extra room you end up with.  Folding T-shirts in this manner doesn't reduce their volume at all - they still take up roughly the same amount of space.  The author mentioned cleaning out old ratty shirts, so maybe that accounts for the change in occupied space.

Also, the tutorials I've seen on this don't seem to account for someone whose clothing is not all the same size/volume due to fluctuating weight and other things, so unless all of your t-shirts

I do find it easier to look for something to wear though.  The real test will come on laundry day when I find out how much of a pain it will be to put newly-laundered t-shirts back in the drawers.

Sometime back The Well-Travelled One, being well-travelled and all, introduced me to the concept of rolling all your shit military style. 

This I like.  I may have gone a wee bit overboard.

My dingy as fuck dishtowels. If anyone needs ideas for Christmas/birthday... don't get me these.  I don't want dishtowels for my birthday.

My pajama/bathing suits/various ephemera drawer

Underwear and socks.  ROLL ALL THE THINGS.

Yes, I can now officially say the internet has seen my underwear.

In tackling the kitchen I realized a few things:

• I have a disturbing number of pairs of scissors
• My kids went through a cupcake phase that only seemed to last long enough that we managed to accumulate a ridiculous amount of cupcake liners, yet I don't recall actually having cupcakes more than three times in the last two years.

Last night I went through all my bills, receipts, old birthday cards and came to the conclusion that I probably have enough of this crap to insulate my house should I come across an industrial strength paper shredder.

Today I intend to tackle the basement and get the rec-room area, which we don't use since we lack anything recreational to put down there (mainly a TV.. we've got about 10 game consoles to hook up to a TV, but no TV), back into some semblance of shape after the Great Christmas Excavation, known to laypeople as 'Pulling out the tree and decorations'.

Speaking of Christmas... does anyone else find it weird that right after Christmas, all the big box stores have sales on storage and organizational equipment, as if to say "Here, it's time to pack away all the useless shit we've been guilting people into buying you for the last four months?"

Quick Update: I'm Guest-Blogging

I have a guest post up at Feministe on the whole Jian Ghomeshi... thing.

Go read it.