Getting Organized (In Theory)

I had a very odd Sunday: I didn't do anything. D* and the older kids went to church in the morning. It was raining hard. I turned off the air conditioning and opened a lot of windows, listened to the rain and the baby, and read a lot of the Happiness Project archives. In the afternoon I played LEGO with the kids, took videos of L with my phone, and did more reading. The TV didn't go on until after dinner, the air conditioning likewise (if it's too hot the boy can't sleep). I had a bunch of stuff I'd wanted to get to, but nothing really urgent. We'd had lunch guests on Saturday, so the place was reasonably clean already. I don't relax very often; sometimes I wonder if I'm forgetting how.

I enjoyed my reading, not least because I was delighted to find some of my own hard-discovered principles among hers. At least for me, a tidy environment is one sizable component of happiness. Clutter and mess stress me out, and so I am coming to understand that Do it now is an important rule if I don't want to be that way. The important corollary is Do it myself--it's better than either steaming or nagging. It only takes a minute or two to wipe off the stove, to throw away (or recycle) that empty container, to put a book back on the shelf. It makes tackling the major chores easier if the first step doesn't always have to be "declutter the room."

I also like her "spend it out" rule, though I don't think it's a major problem for me--not least because we moved last year, so we've already and recently gone through all of our things and gotten rid of clothes never worn, books never read, and broken objects. Now that we've been here a whole year, I find that I retain this winnowing eye. We have more stuff than can comfortably fit into the space, so I've been shoving some of it into the attic--thinning the book collection, recognizing that the photo albums just won't get updated for a while, since there's nowhere to put them, passing outgrown baby things along promptly--and investing in some storage devices for the rest of it, especially the 10,000 toys we seem to have accumulated.

Here's a list of interesting-looking links I gathered from her:

• The Happiness Project
• Unclutterer
• Flylady
• 43 Things
• Work It Mom
• Listography

I asked my mom for a toolbox for Christmas, tired of rummaging through our cardboard box of oddities, hoping I won't stab myself on a rusty screwdriver (which if it isn't a drink, ought to be).

I just realized as I put together the link list--I'm better! I am back to being the me who is energized by having a lot to do, who plans for the future, who wants to accomplish. Whew. One of the things I'm going to put on a list (somewhere) is to buy a sunlamp, so the next dreary spring doesn't knock me for a loop.