Sunday, November 6, 2011

Plan B

So last weekend my mom and I worked on my craft room.  We straightened and organized and mostly cleared out the spot I had in mind for my new daybed.  In fact, all that was really left to clear out was a full trash bag (that I filled when I cleaned out my old car in...um...May 2008) and a box in the corner (and a few things stacked on top of the box).  Not much at all, and I figured I could get through it all pretty quickly.

In general, I was right.  I have a general system when it comes to organizing, which is to say take my first pile (or bag, or box) and make several piles out of it.  A pile to keep (which may be seperated into several different piles), a pile to donate and a pile to throw away (I learned this system from an old TLC show).  Now, this is only a partly successsful system for me, because I generally don't do anything with the "keep" pile; I just push it together into its own new pile and go about my business feeling good about having a smaller pile (because I can guarantee that 2008 JE kept a bunch of stuff in her car that was ready for the trash can or Goodwill).  So clearing out the trashbag and other small bags/boxes went pretty well. I had a great donate pile, a full bag of trash, and a medium sized pile of things to save (most of which wouldn't pass J's "save" test, but pass mine in the name of baby steps).

Feeling pretty good about myself, I moved on to the box.  Now, the box was labeled "Kitchen/Pictures" so I suspected that it might have been packed when I moved out of my apartment in 2007, but that more likely it had been emptied and re-packed a few years ago when my mom and I tackled the craft room during one of her visits.  I was wrong.  It was packed up four years ago, deposited by the movers in this corner, and left.  I found four binders full of grad school notes, several framed items, my old toaster oven and the crock pot that I was sure must have been donated to Goodwill on accident back in '07. 

Now, the toaster went straight to the Goodwill pile.  I'm not so certain about the crock pot (Side note:  this was a pretty nice crock pot and as a result, I didn't register for one when we got married.  When I couldn't find it, I decided to suck it up and deal with using J's old crock pot, until we finally bought one for ourselves a couple years ago.  Now, because I adhere to the 'you can never have too many crock pots' mentality, I hung on to J's 'just in case'.  I finally convinced myself to let go of it last week.  So I'm pretty sure this is the universe's way of telling me that I was right, and that only by letting go of the old crock pot could I be brought back together with my first crock pot.  So I can't just take this one off to Goodwill.  Can I?). 

The framed items are another story:  several pictures of me with my sisters, a couple of cross-stitch ADPi pieces my mom made, an old mirror--all things that should probably find a home on the walls in my craft room.  Oh, and a framed picture of me with an old boyfriend.  Not quite sure what to do with that.  WHAT?, you're thinking.  Why would you hang on to that?  Well, here's the thing.  This is a picture from 2003 (I think), and he's wearing a tee-shirt that says "Plan B".  Now, I'm a girl who looks for purpose and signs and reasons to make things work (see previous paragraph on why I shouldn't throw out a crock pot I lived without for four years).  I know I looked at that picture a thousand times, and I know that it was looked at by an awful lot of people since it sat on my desk at work for at least a year.  I don't recall ever noticing or explaining his tee-shirt.  (For the record, he belonged to a game group called Plan B, and they had tee-shirts made up.  But no one knew that.) To the outsider (or me, when I glanced at it today), it kind of looks like he was proclaiming to be my Plan B.  Like those "I'm with stupid" tee-shirts that suggest everyone is in on the joke, we were walking around with a giant neon sign declaring that we weren't anything lasting.  How on earth did I miss that sign?  I'm not sure, but I suspect it is that I wasn't looking for it.  Just like I wasn't yet looking for my Plan A, the guy snoozing on my couch downstairs pretending to watch football. I'm kind of tempted to keep the picture out as a reminder to me.   Or maybe to tuck it in another box to pull out in another four or five years.

Oh, and I've decided not to put the daybed where I thought, so the bookshelf is now in the spot I just cleaned.  And I've moved on to Plan B in the craft room.  With luck, you'll see a picture of that tomorrow.

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