Nablopomo post no. 15 - cleaning marathons and rest days.

At one point I was a devotee of FLYLady's method of cleaning and keeping house. I found I had to keep adapting it and adapting it yet again to fit my lifestyle and schedule until it looked very different from her program. Instead of going by the Julian calendar for the basis of my cleaning schedule, I switched to the lunar cycle. There's more consistency in the lunar cycle than there is in the Julian calendar, which makes things easier for me.

I have four major living areas in my home. I was including the entryway but because I wasn't getting paid for the work and it still looked awful when I was done because of dirt ground into the paint, I gave up. Nowadays I sweep the space with a glance and just go out of it. Between filthy neighbors who throw their trash everywhere and the fact that I can't get it truly clean, there's no point. (My eldest son did me a big favor pulling the trash the neighbors dumped into the garden out of there last week.)

My four living areas are the kitchen, bathroom, bedrooms, and the living room. The week after the new moon, I work on the kitchen. The week of the waxing gibbous moon, I work on the bathroom. The week of the full moon, I work on the living room. And the week of the waning gibbous moon, I work on bedrooms.

To some this may look like madness and that I'm engaged in panic cleaning for the whole month. But that's not completely true. The three days around the new and the full moon, I have a rest period. If a holiday falls during the week, I take a day off from cleaning to observe it. And I'm not spending all day cleaning, just 15 to 30 minutes. I have been trying to get my sons in on this. My eldest is finally starting to fall into the rhythm of it. He's been helping out with daily chores like dishes. We work on them for 15 minutes and then he's done. My youngest is still very scattershot about cleaning. When he focuses and stays on task he does a great job. But that ADHD makes it hard for him to focus. Beloved and I think it is a maturity thing and over the next two years he'll make some leaps and start falling into the cleaning rhythm too. 

Burning out.

Today was a long and exhausting day. I spent 90% of it cleaning and directing the kids in cleaning. After all of this work, the toys are now sorted out. The books are all organized on their shelves. The toybox is full and sitting in its proper location. The extra blankets are stowed in the kids' chests. We got a lot of stuff done. Looking around the room, though, it doesn't feel like we did. Thinks were relatively picked up this morning.

I tripped over a few toys as I was walking across the room and saw a bin full of just random stuff. I got angry. Then I started cleaning. The kids were confused when I dumped out the toybox. They were even more confused when I insisted that they couldn't just throw anything in there. It was a painful process to sort all of their toys. They didn't like it. I didn't like it. But it was something that hadn't been done in over two years. When things started to shape up as how they were going to get put away, it got easier.

I'm glad that I saved those stupid McDonald's halloween buckets. I used four of them. Two to hold dinosaurs and random animals. One to hold knock off transformer toys (which were in happy meals originally) and one to hold all of the action figures they've got. We have three gallon sized bins full of toy cars and an additional fleet stowed neatly beneath a shelf and a table, mostly. I have recycled a large box that held pullups to hold large dinosaur toys and large action figures. I also recycled a slightly smaller box to hold stuffed animals.

The big innovation was taking the box that Cuddle Bear's toy weed wacker came in and turning it into a shelf on the wall. Instead of holding the weed wacker, it is full of small stuffed animals. The whole affair is light enough that it can stay up with three anchor points. The other innovation came from taking a box that the electric grill came in and cutting it up to make a 'tool box' out of it. Between the two tool boxes they had to begin with and this third one, they have 90% of their toy hand tools put away underneath their toy workbench. Sitting on top of it is the rubber work belt that came with it (with tools in their respective places) and a handful of others with it.

I have folded up the extra blankets that the kids kept shoving around on their beds and put them in the base of their chests from Grandpa M. When they went to bed, they didn't notice the blankets missing. Maybe we can manage to get to the beginning of cool weather before they come back out. I don't know. It did make for them to have an easier time making their beds. (This is a new thing. The kids mess up the sheets on their beds and, in the past, we fixed them. Now they are taking responsibility for it. The results thus far have been mixed. Hopefully putting the blankets away, this will make for more positive results.)

Their brand-name Transformers toys are sitting on top of their bookcase. The extra large ones are in back against the wall. The smaller ones are towards the front, where they are easier to access. Snuggle Bug broke Cuddle Bear's new one this afternoon, so I took away his more complicated version of Bumblebee. We'll see if he bears this in mind when he is sharing with his brother. If he breaks his brother's brand new transformer again, I believe that I will have to put them up for a bit. As it stands, we are missing one somewhere. In all of our cleaning, we have not found it. I suspect it is under the couch, which we did not touch today.

I didn't get the kitchen clean. I ran out of energy for that. I didn't get any laundry put away. And I have a pile of mail that I really need to go through but I am apprehensive about it all. I look back over the day today and I realize that in some respects today's big business of going through the toys was a form of procrastination. Because why procrastinate in a small way when you can go huge, right? Thus, tomorrow morning, I think I will do a 'bad mommy' thing and let the kids watch cartoons as I go through the mail, balance the checkbook, pay bills, and make official phone calls.

I'm super anxious about looking for a new psychiatrist. I'm afraid that they're going to look at my file from where I have been getting services and take the abject nonsense that these people have written as gospel and ignore what I have to say about it all. Money anxiety is taking a backseat to this.

Is it over yet?

The clock is ticking down to the official end of 2015. I'll be perfectly honest, I am looking forward to this. The past year has been a lot of hard work. I am hoping that next year will be a little less labor intensive. I have been banned from working on Yule gifts for next year until the beginning of next year. As Beloved pointed out, I will have 365 days to work on it because it is a leap year.

I have been struggling with keeping up with the FLYLady thing over the last year. I am basically rebooting the process and starting over again from square one in January. I know that I need more structure in my days. FLYLady helped provide that. I am confident, however, that I can get back on that bicycle and ride with out too much trouble. I have the FLYLady book and my control journal. I don't necessarily need the website. Which, honestly, is looking like a good thing.

The emails from FLYLady are getting preachy again, and not in the sense of 'let's do this stuff to organize our lives' but in the sense of 'praise Jesus' variety. I don't have a problem with Christianity. It seems to be a faith that works really well for a lot of people. What I've read of the teachings of Jesus, there is a good deal of wisdom there. I take issue, however, when people that I am patronizing for an entirely different purpose begin preaching at me. I am debating removing myself from that email list.

I have started a journal where I track my mental state, my diet, and what exercise I do. It takes a little effort to remember to do so. It also takes some effort to remember to do some exercise on a given day. My goal with this journal, however, is to gather data that will allow me to get a good picture of how my moods cycle. In my other journal for daily writing, I am going to attempt to get a picture of a given day's major events. My thought is I can cross reference between the two and know what happened that day and how it effected my health. All of this is an effort to get myself healthier.

I am looking over things like where I want to be this time next year and what I want to have accomplished. I believe that my sense that I need to organize is a good thing. I think this is actually one of those times where I can make my anxiety work in my favor. I just have to stick to my rules for being healthy and such. As long as I can make it through with out breaking taboos, I think I can turn this into a very good year.

Rambling post about nothing.

I haven't posted in here a few days. Nothing momentous has happened in that time. I just forgot to post. I will try to post more often going forward. I know I keep saying that and then I forget again.

I am making progress in getting my mental health stuff taken care of. I will be applying for disability again. I think that I may be able to get it this time. I feel a bit apprehensive about the process but I think that my most recent bout of severe depression served as a wake up call to me. I can't just go about ignoring when I have something wrong or assuming that it will just get better on its own. My will may be strong but the flesh is weak, and that includes my brain chemistry stuff.

I got back on the FLYwagon. The living room is cleaner then it has been in a little over a month. It's kinda funny. I literally had to use a shovel (a toy one, that is) to clean up some of the toys. Between having some difficulty reaching into the space where stuff was accumulated and there being such a large volume of stuff, the toy snow shovel turned out to be really useful. It was, however, a very odd experience.

I have finished the blanket for Moo. I am making good progress on the one for Sophia. It has gotten large enough, however, to be just plain awkward to work on. The recent heat hasn't exactly been friendly towards working on this big ol' thing either. I have been using a small box to hold the blanket up off my lap so I don't overheat quite so much. It seems to be working out well, with the exception of the corners of the box catching the blanket from time to time.

The sparrows nesting in the overhang above the stoop have mixed feelings about all this time the kids have been spending outside. The male sparrow get all puffed up and chirps agitatedly at us. The female, however, has no qualms about going to the feeder or even hopping on the ground when we're out there. She won't do it when the boys are near the feeder or the end of the walkway by the house, but if they're a good six feet away, she will hop on the ground from time to time. I think she, at least, has decided that we're not a threat to her or her young.

Beloved has been talking about learning what the names of the birds that we have visiting our feeders are. Today, I have seen a few cardinals, three or four starlings, and the sparrows. A male and a female Baltimore Oriole have been pretty frequent visitors over the last few weeks. It makes me wonder if they are nesting nearby.

The suet feeder seems to be more popular then the seed one. We go through a block of suet every few days. Fortunately, the suet is fairly inexpensive. The net bag of Easter grass that I put up just didn't get touched by the birds when they were busy making nests. It just confirms that the stuff is abhorrent. I briefly contemplated attempting to spin it and then cast the thought aside, along with the stuff. I do think, however, that next spring, I will put up another suet feeder cage but for a little while it will be filled with cut ends of yarn from my projects. I saw someone else had done this for the birds to use in their nesting supplies with some success.

It is amazing the things you will find on Pinterest. Just today, I was looking at ideas for how to live in a tiny house. The tiny house movement just amazes me. I know that if we moved into one, we simply wouldn't have space for all our books and that would be... painful to part with. I think, however, that I can use some of those tricks to make things like my kitchen more efficient. Some of the ideas were really useful in managing all the kids' toys.

I am seriously thinking about acquiring some underbed storage for the kids room and for my room. Beloved and I have a lot of stuff just piled up in our room because we have no where to put it. I think if I put the bed upon risers and put some storage stuff under there, it would make it easier to finally put everything away in there. The project room  on the other hand...

Well, I think I need to do a complete overhaul of how I have things put away in there. I have tons of kid stuff just littering the floor. Then there is all of my project stuff. Some of it, I haven't touched in months. I did, however, get out my stuff and did some painting last weekend. When Beloved has the software for the camera updated on here, I will try to snap a few pictures and share them. I am not entirely sure what more to add. I suppose this means my post has come to a conclusion. I'll try to come up with something more interesting next time.

Challenges and chances.

I wish I could report that my lack of posting was due to something fun. Unfortunately, I had been struggling over the last three months with depression. It seems that one of my medications stopped working properly and I wound up in the hospital for a bout a week as the good doctors and nurses sorted that out. I have been home for a few days busily trying to catch up on all the things that got missed or forgotten in that fog of depression. Writing pretty much anything was a struggle, let alone regularly blogging.

On my new medication regimen, I am feeling much better. I have had some ups and downs over the last few days but nothing like what it was before I went into the hospital. I am somewhat overwhelmed by the sheer volume of things that I let slip by. Fortunately, Beloved has been totally awesome and caught things like the car insurance bill that I forgot while I was away. I am still trying not to over do it, but it is frustrating. A part of me wants to say that since I am no longer as horribly depressed, I obviously am well enough to jump right back into my usual routine.

I try that and then I come away exhausted, upset, and generally disheartened. FLYLady's methods have been helpful to me. I didn't realize how much I had moved away from using them during my more serious period of illness until I looked at my little journal and noticed that none of the appointments of the last two and a half months had been written in there. It rather shook me to see that. I am, however, recommitting myself to the program.

A strict bedtime has become a necessity. With my new medication regimen, I find that I need to be in bed by 9:30 or 9:45 at the latest or I have a very hard time waking up in the morning. The nurses at the hospital said that the side effects that cause such morning sluggishness will wear off as I acclimate to the new medicine I'm on. I am optimistic, however, that I will find myself able to go through life with less extreme ups and downs now because of it. The other antidepressants that I have been on are not typically prescribed for someone with bipolar (which is one diagnosis among many that I have now). This one, however, is one of the most frequently prescribed ones for people like me.

I have returned to reading some every day. During the hardest portion of my latest severe depressive episode, I had a hard time concentrating to read a paragraph, let alone a page. It may sound silly, but I missed reading books while I was ill. I knew that I was on the mend when I sat down and read the rather cheezy romance novel that was kicking around the hospital wing I was in and finished it in an afternoon. I was more then a little bit amused by the nurses' general expressions of shock.

I'm currently reading the first book in the Harry Potter series. I'm about halfway through it. I have come to the conclusion that the thing which would cure Draco Malfoy's snottiness would be a spanking and getting grounded. I'm told that this character becomes more tolerable as the series continues. I hope so, because I wouldn't want to start throwing books at the wall. I've seen two of the movies. I can say in all honesty, the movie portrayal that Alan Rickman did of Professor Snape is dead on target.

I have started work on my gardening projects for the spring/summer. While I'm not one hundred percent convinced that we're past the danger of frost, I still sowed some seed yesterday. I planted seeds for lettuce, nasturtium, a day lily variant, and a few other things that I can't recall right now. I have a box of shade seed mix to spread out front where there is a big barren spot beside the front steps. On the box, it says that it is good for places that get one to four hours of sunlight in the day. I think this particular spot gets one hour of sunlight, two at most.

My reclaimed firepit that is getting turned into a circular-ish bed is currently a bit stalled. I have some gardening fabric that I put down to block weeds. I need to cover it with soil before I can even begin to think about planting anything there. My plan is to put down the old soil from a few big pots over the fabric. I want to then put a layer of mulch over it before covering with fresh bagged soil. That spot gets a lot of sunlight.

I don't think a rose bush will do well in that spot because it doesn't get quite enough sun to call it full sun. I will, however, plant things like marigold, phlox, and a few other things that tolerate that kind of lighting. I have a tiny little shepherd's crook in the middle of the bed. My plan is to take a twig and make a little set of windchimes to hang there with the remains of two broken windchimes. If by some wild chance I can somehow afford that lantern styled stand for in the middle of that spot, I will replace the shepherd crook with that and make it into something of an outdoor little shrine for me to pray at while I garden.

I am picking up the non-fiction manuscript that I was working on in April. My goal is to finish it by the end of the summer. I think I can accomplish it within that time frame. Right now, I'm approximately a quarter of the way done. When I am finished writing the prose for the manuscript, I will be breaking out my art supplies to draw some illustrations for it. Because I don't want to go through the expense of color printing, I think they're going to be just basic black pen and ink.

When I'm not working on the non-fiction manuscript, I will be doing some background work on book three of the Umbrel Chronicles of Evandar. I wanted to have this book have more 'light' in it but true to the themes of the story-lines, the story just gets progressively darker. I felt badly about this at first but then I realized that it really was necessary within the larger story arc of the series. The first trilogy of the series talks about how the heroine of the series is orphaned and a failed attempt to restore her to her rightful place. The second trilogy talks about life under the rule of the usurper and how the heroine grows into womanhood as a Robin Hood-esque outlaw. While aware of her birthright, the heroine is more focused on the needs of the people around her and struggles with her identity, trying to determine as all young people do, just who she is.

The third trilogy is the first to really focus on the heroine's actions as an adult. This trio of books talks about how she embarks on a war to reclaim her throne, the sacrifices that are made to do so, and the actions of the gods in the characters' lives. After this comes the fourth trilogy that describes the remainder of this war, as well as the beginnings of a larger war between the gods. It ends with the heroine winning her victory and a suggestion that perhaps all shall be well, though dark things are brooding in the periphery that speaks of the next part of the series.

I haven't decided what I'm going to call that collection of books, because they will not take place within the kingdom of Evandar. I want to keep the suggestion of shadows, darkness, and nightfall in place. The greater story arc of the series, including the prequel trilogy that is named the Penumbral Chronicle of Evandar, speaks of a war between the gods. The god of evil, suffering, and sorrow seeks to reclaim the goddess of life as his own. In a previous time, the first great war happened and the demigods, who are children of the god of evil and the god of honor, storms, and good by the goddess of life, fought this war and dragged humanity into it. The forces of good triumphed over those of evil and the demigods of evil were banished in to the 'outer darkness' or 'the void' as some would call it. The god of evil was bound but his followers eventually found a way to remove those bindings.

With the removal of the bindings, the god of evil plotted how to bring down the god of good and reclaim the goddess of life. Thus, the events of the Penumbral Chronicle and the Umbrel Chronicles of Evandar have their foundation in the machinations of the god of evil. There is, however, hope that is embodied within the heroine of the Umbrel Chronicles, who is the last begotten child of the god of good, though even she doesn't fully comprehend what this means until the latter portion of the series unfolds. The second great war arises from the ashes of the heroine's war to reclaim her birthright.

Actions of those who supported the usurper, who is a follower of the god of evil, work to unleash the demigods who are the children of the god of evil. Then, the heroine must hold her kingdom together as her husband embarks in a divinely appointed quest to summon the reclusive demigods of good back into the world. That quest takes a heavy toll on the heros of that story but in the end, the succeed in bringing the good demigods back. Then the story of the war between the gods unfurls. It ends with the forces of good triumphing at a steep price, an almost Pyrrhic victory of sorts.

I have all of the books outlined in a notebook. There's 21 books in the series. And I have ideas for other stories to write within that world. At times, I get intimidated by the daunting task of writing these stories down. But then I realize that if I don't write them, nothing will come of them and I will still be left with the need to write them. Writing these books is less of a matter of trying to reach fame, though it'd be nice, and more of getting the story out of my head so that I can move on to other things.

As I am working on my non-fiction writing, I keep feeling the pull to write the fiction. I try to scratch that itch by writing in different genres. It make work for a temporary fix but I keep coming back to this truly epic story. I have been attempting to write this series for 20 years. I have a massive pile of notebooks of background material. I have sketchbooks with maps and similar details drawn out. For each thing I write down, three more reveal themselves as needing to be written. All of this stuff started out as a little story that I lived in my head as a child. So, in some manifestations, I have been working on this series for thirty years.

I honestly don't know if I'm going to manage to write it all down. It is, something, however, that I'm going to attempt to do over the years. Writing two books a year is a good start. Who knows, maybe somewhere I'll stumble onto an professional editor who will help me polish these things up and I'll get a publication contract or something.

15 min turned into 1.5 hrs

 So, FlyLady's Flight Plan for today included a mission to clean 15 min in the zone of the day, which is the living room. Specifically, the mission was to pick up things that didn't belong in the living room and put them where they were supposed to go.

I did a bit more then that. To the left are the before shots of the main spaces of the living room. I picked up some of the toy cars before taking the first one and then remembered I wanted to start documenting my progress with FlyLady.

 This is actually an improvement over how the room was a few days ago. With everybody being sick most of the last few weeks, all of the cleaning piled up. I think the living room was the worst offender, to be honest.

So, I snapped a few pictures and then put on some music and set to work. I started out focusing on picking up one corner of the room and working my way around the room counter clock wise. Widdershins to banish the mess, why not, right?

 I paused for a little bit to eat a quick lunch (that ultimately proved insufficient with all the cleaning I was doing). I didn't bother snapping a picture of my lunch because I was pretty much eating all the veggies that were left over from dinner over the last few nights.

The corner toy storage area is improved, though looking at this picture I realize that I missed some stuff. I think, however, it will be a simple matter of telling the boys now they need to 'help' clean up before they get to play with the blanket fort.

 I still have laundry to fold and put away, but that is no big deal. I am more then a little bit confident that the laundry will be a fairly straight forward affair this afternoon.

Tomorrow's laundry run, however, is going to be a lot of work. I didn't get the wash done this weekend and just wasn't up to doing it this morning. So, tomorrow is laundry day. If I had enough laundry baskets, I would fold everything as I took it out of the dryer.

The days of being able to fit all our laundry into two baskets, however, are long gone.