I’m so behind on everything right now, but things ARE finally finishing and getting out the door, thankfully. I’m not sure what happened — I think I was a little depressed in May / June, because nothing got done for a while — I guess that’s not surprising, after a really brutal year of online teaching. I sort of staggered over the finish line in May and collapsed for a while afterwards. I suspect most teachers were in the same state.
Among other things, the basement fell apart. I had started a big reorganization during pandemic winter, buying a bunch of IKEA shelving units, assembling them, pulling things out ready to put back in organized — but then I got busy, and that last part never happened, so everything was just out everywhere, and then we just kept throwing things down there (sending the kids down with piles of stuff, saying, “Just find a clear patch of floor…”), and it got very higgledy-piggledy, to the point of weaving through piles to get to oh, a suitcase, or a hammer…and more importantly not really being able to work down there at all.
This was not good, because the basement is where all the sewing stuff is.
Last week the painters finally were able to come and paint the ceiling, which should help with the falling dust issue (fingers crossed), and then, with the family’s help, I cleaned out and organized the Serendib section, and then two days ago, I finally cleared out and organized the sewing section, hooray. That’s all peaceful and ready for working again, so I finished an extremely overdue mask order (so overdue that I wrote to the recipient and confirmed that they still wanted them, rather than a refund, and they said yes and were very nice about it, thank you!).
It felt so good, sewing straight seams again. I do find sewing soothing when it’s going well. I even did a little fabric design yesterday too, which also felt good.
But the sewing also felt ridiculous, because I’d already cut and layered the fabric MONTHS ago, and I only had about 45 minutes of sewing left to finish the order, but I couldn’t actually GET to my sewing machine for a while, and it was also super-depressing looking at all the mess down there; I have a very hard time working in chaos. It sets off all the ADD pinging in my brain, and makes me feel panicky and overwhelmed.
Well, done now, going out the door today, and hopefully we can KEEP it clean down there going forward. The goal is to get it organized enough that I can actually have the cleaners clean that area too when they come, and if they’re doing that every two weeks, it should go a long way towards keeping us on track. Fingers crossed.
And hey, look at new light fixture! I was also super-short on light down there, which was depressing, and I kept thinking I had to find a better ceiling light solution, which is hard because it might involve an electrician, and the ceilings are low which limits things, but eventually I realized (after months of fretting about this) that I could just buy a couple of inexpensive standing lamps and look — INSTANT LIGHT. (This photo is amusingly moody, but when I turn on the ceiling lights too, it’s actually fairly bright down there.) Sometimes, solutions are much simpler than you think they’re going to be….
