The wunderground forecast for my zip code is for snow, all day, 60 percent chance. Happily, I note that I haven't seen one flake.
So far decluttering, for spring and for gardening*, has meant cleaning out the garage with the help of some dear friends, and moving the king sized bed by means off waggling my eyelashes at my dear sweet husband. He moved the bedroom around to accommodate a new (to us) chest of drawers and a craft table I got last year at a yard sale. Hopefully, this will mean a LOT of stuff moving out of the garage and into the bedroom and into steady use. I thought by having the beadwork equipment in the garage, I would use it more, but I don't use it out there at all. Either I am too cold, or there is a van in the way (imagine! in a garage!) or there's so much winter-crap all over the place I couldn't reach the beads anyway.
This way, hurt or not, if I don't use my beads, they're going. And hurt it will, but I don't want hangers-on clutter in my life, of any kind. Life is good, and I want it to be a light life.
When gardening* season comes, the kids and I spend so much time in the outside that we completely neglect the interior. I have a month or two where I can ready the house for this, by getting rid of the winter closed-up smell and by engineering the house into easy-maintenance mode. Similar to the learning curve Betsy mentions here, with every year we strive for voluntary simplicity and sustainability, the needs we have for our home change. We have no outbuildings or basement, so we need space in the garage to start seeds and store the excess canning, not to mention all the reasons you use a garage for in the first place. The kitchen had to be re-ordered last fall to reflect the work we do in there, from canning and brewing to sprouting and baking. Gardening directly feeds into those processes (pun fully intended) because when we do begin to harvest, we have to have a way to process and preserve it. Now that the kitchen is in order--if not pretty-- we can now accomplish those tasks much more efficiently.
I mentioned a month or so ago how much I missed bar stools. Reeciebird really came through for us with a set of barstools her mother was trying to rehome. Yesterday, D-meister sat at the counter and watched me cut onions while he had some tea and a snack. "Whoa!" he said, admiring the knifework, "That's cool!" He'd never seen me slice onions before! The stools-- the proximity to my workspace they give my kids-- have already fulfilled their purpose. That's another big mark in the gratitude department!
I agree! Arizona has it right. And not only because changing the clocks is such a pain, but because it is just too damned early to go on DST. I mean, it is going to be dark until 8 AM in the morning again, so people will be using their lights in the morning. And more hours of heat on while they are at home.
ReplyDeleteI say leave the time alone!