dragonlady7

hate wasting time more, and this is just all a clusterfuck, but anyway

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So I took Friday off. I haven’t really been home much; my weekends have been spent driving back and forth to and from the farm, and then I’ve felt I have to work every hour I’m home, to make up for having been gone during lockdown, and to try and earn some money, and to make up for never being around, and such.

So I haven’t had time for much cleaning of my house. And honestly, going back years, I’m not around much and things have gotten way out of hand.

I’m not exactly doing NaClYoHoMo (National Clean Your House Month, for people who don’t need to write a novel, haha) but I’m writing about it anyway.

Dude is staring down the realization that 1) his office isn’t opening back up, and 2) he’s been working out on the sunporch but it’s getting cold so he won’t be able to sit there anymore, and 3) he very much does not want to have to spend his working days sitting at our cluttered tiny kitchen table.

So he asked if we could spend this weekend clearing out the guest bedroom. The bed was covered mostly in my laundry, and then there’s a desk covered in my correspondence as well as our household backup server, and there’s a table next to the desk covered in… miscellaneous things including my old iMac and such.

So I spent Friday cleaning our bedroom, because taking yet another pile of clothing in there would just make an irredeemable mess. In the course of that, I got a broom and hoed out an entire laundry basket full of garments, mostly socks, from under the bed. Then I hauled in all the extra laundry from the guest room, and got all my shit out of there, so Dude could work unimpeded on Saturday.

I spent the whole day, and then I spent almost all day on Saturday, and then I spent several long hours on Sunday, and at the end of it the room doesn’t look much different. My ADHD means that if I put things in drawers I lose them, so I have a lot, and by that I mean a lot, of clothing, because if I can’t see it, I don’t know I have it. I now have hundreds of pairs of socks, because I found my odd sock bin from roughly the same vintage, I think, as Chita’s sock hoard’s beginning, and I paired the ones I could (and there are so many left over…)

A few years back, Middle-Little came out and among other things we installed a bunch of hooks on the wall of my bedroom, so that I could hang garments up. The bedroom has one closet, half of which used to be mine, but Dude keeps his clothes in an expanding pile on the floor and I can no longer get close to the closet, so I really can’t use it. So I took all my dresses out of it, and now I have the formal and special occasion ones in the closet of the guest bedroom, and the informal workday ones hanging on the hooks on my wall along with all my vests and jackets and things.

It doesn’t look neater, at all, but I did find a few things I’m excited to wear again. I feel like I wasted the weekend; my goal was to do some writing and I did almost none, and my other goal was to do some textile art– either finish the half-done masks I was working on, or start the art quilts I have ideas for for Christmas presents, or– anything, really.

And I distinctly remember when that pile of clothing started to get out of control. It was during the lead-up to my first ever roller derby bout, when I was overworked and scrambling and exhausted, and I told myself, “after the bout’s over I’ll get all that sorted out and put away!”

that was February of 2007. So. Yeah, it was time.

Meanwhile, on Saturday, Dude started cleaning the guest bedroom. He spent several hours carefully going through boxes of set-aside items, carefully dusting things off (… onto the floor), organizing them, collecting them in various places. I asked him what his plan was for the furniture he planned to remove and he acted like that was a crazy thing to ask. (Well? You want to take that table out, it’s in there because it doesn’t fit through doors and we don’t have anywhere else it can go. I didnt’ think it was a crazy question.)

On Sunday he worked a little more. I’d cleared off the desk for him, but he ignored it, and kept working on the piles of things he’d stashed on the desk. But then he got his thumb stung by a bee or wasp or something, and he spent the rest of the day gingerly holding his hand in the air and not doing any more.

So the guest room isn’t cleaned out either, and the floor is extra-filthy and now there’s lint getting tracked all over the house from him carefully brushing things off onto the floor, so that’s annoying and hasn’t improved anyone’s life. I’m frustrated and feel like no progress was made. But, it’s stuff that’s been a mess for like a decade now, so that’s all better than not doing anything I guess. I guess! I guess? We’ll see.

At least the mood was festive, due to the election news, and I spent Sunday in a fancy party dress that got absolutely covered in filth while I was cleaning but it’s washable so I’m not worried about that. And I plan to wear a different forgotten-about dress every day this week, to make up for maybe a little of the annoyance of cleaning. I do own a lot of dresses. None of them are quite what I want. Maybe that’s part of this whole awful thing– I found so much clothing that still does fit me but the vast majority of it isn’t a style I really care to wear, but I can’t bear to get rid of it because it does fit, and honestly I don’t know what my style is, so what am I going to get instead?? A lot of it’s stuff I bought in desperation because nothing fit; I’d routinely go to a website, add every single garment that was capable of fitting me to my shopping cart (so, came in approximately my size, had thick enough shoulder straps, no surplice front because those never accomodate my bust, no empire waists because those invariably attempt to cut my tits in half, etc), then I’d go back through and eliminate the ones I cared for least, until I was left with a reasonable-sized order of, hopefully, things I actually would wear. Depressingly often, I’d wind up with nothing.

Plus-size shopping has gotten slightly better, but I still have a lot of that ingrained in my consciousness. I don’t get to buy clothes I want, I get to find clothes that fit and then within that smallish selection try to hunt for something that I don’t hate. And I’m not even that big.

(I am pleased to point out that I don’t seem to have much too-small clothing left from before my brief attempt to get medicated for something got me depression meds instead of ADHD ones and Celexa re-set my metabolic setpoint to be fully 30 pounds higher than my old maximum; that was around 2010, and most of my old size 14-16 stuff is long gone somehow, which does indicate that the archaelogical strata have at least been rifled through in the interim.)

Anyway. Hopefully I can keep going and make the bedroom reasonable and maybe inspire Dude to do something about his slowly-expanding Pile Of Shit that’s taken over his entire half of the room, and maybe then I can make some progress and like. Get the living room into shape, and then it can look like people live here by the time…

sigh, by the time the new farm season comes around and I don’t really live here anymore for a while.