Knotty Mouse

1. Avada Kedavra Sock, 2. “dining room”- before 3. “dining room”- after

I know.. I know.. “holy shit.. KNITTING? On Mouse’s knitting blog? No way!” yes, way. I’ve been chugging along at night on the Killing Curse socks and have turned the heel on sock #1 while watching obscene amounts of CSI:Miami. I also found a “new way” (new to me anyway..) of doing a hole free short row heel which can be found here and is WAY easier than my previous method which was rather hit or miss. The pain in my hand from knitting is mild as long as I don’t knit for hours at a time.. so I’m trying to monitor my time and fly under the radar on that one. While I do miss knitting constantly I do NOT want to injure my hand/wrist anymore and risk further and more serious damage.. so I’m taking it one project at a time.

The photos on the right side are a before and after of my (useless for its intended purposes - which makes me wonder what sort of idiot designed these houses) dining room. Our house is a split level and its the room you come into when you come up the steps from the front door - so the mess and the clutter made me sad every time I came home. This is also the room that connects every other room upstairs so I was constantly looking at the mess and wishing it would go away even though I had no idea where to start in fixing it - some messes are overwhelming like that. A few days ago I ended up pulling everything out, throwing most of the contents of the top of the large table in a cardboard box to be sorted later, moving all the things hiding UNDER the table into the garage, and bringing up a small card table in its place. The small table with two padded chairs (also hiding in other rooms taking up space) became a really nice place to do homework with Munchkin at night.

Fair amount of bitching and an overdose of the real life of Mousie and a fair amount of swearing under the cut.. (so if you read this on bloglines you can feel free to skip the rest of this post if you don’t want to hear it) Read the rest of this entry »

1. relief, 2. closet in progress

The photo on the left was taken earlier this morning and those trash bags are filled with clothes from my closet bound for charity.  At the moment its up to 4 trash bags including one not pictured with clothing that went directly into the trash.  The box at the front is now completely filled with shoes for donation. The photo on the right is my closet in the process of being organized - the clothing is hanging freely with moving room as opposed to its usual ‘crammed’ state. The floor is now empty except for a line of shoes and two small laundry baskets of stuff that didn’t get sorted because my back finally gave out on me.

The big deal about this being “eye candy” for me.. is that I’m very attached to my clothing and pretty much unwilling to part with any of it.  People who know me joke that they would NEVER sign me up for something like TLC’s “What Not to Wear”  because I’d probably try to off the hosts when they either tear up or try to throw away my clothing.  I’m sentimental about my clothing, I’m also cheap and refuse to get rid of things that are still “perfectly good” even if I did purchase them at the thrift store’s 99 cent day.  Now none of this would be a bad thing if the mess that is left from having all of these clothes (aka- nowhere to put it “away” or possible way of ’storing’ all of it) didn’t make me stressed out - but seeing it all makes me crazy.  I’ve tried to get rid of stuff in the past.. and succeeded in removing a few items here or there when they become unwearable but it was never enough to even put a dent in fixing the problem.

I’m sort of stunned that I had so much in my wardrobe that either didn’t actually fit anymore or was in such bad shape that I didn’t even consider it worthy of donating to charity and instead it went into a trash bag.  I’ll be taking the bags of clothes to the thrift store tomorrow.. and I honestly can’t WAIT to be rid of it all.  I actually walked into my closet ( a feat in itself) today and was looking through the hanging clothing and saw more things that I could part with - which is something I never find myself thinking. I’m hoping that its the motivation that I needed to jump start a huge house-wide purge of clutter. I’m also finally feeling like I could get this all under control soon, which makes me very happy.