or Carrot Top.
It's that bad. I find myself opening MS Word and then closing it or even getting up and leaving the room. Same thing with my notebook. I carry it around the house with me but don't actually open it.
I guess I should just suck it up and post what I have, but I can't promise anyone will enjoy it. Here goes:
Title: "The French Braid of Life"
Most of the time, I am pretty dextrous when it comes to keeping all the hairs under control while I weave them into the 'do of life, but lately more and more strands are slipping out of my hands and making a snarly mess of things.
...and that's all I had. After I wrote it, I realized it sounded horribly melodramtic. Mostly I was thinking about how the act of cleaning Hannah's room led to a bunch of other tasks. For instance, I went through Hannah's closet and got rid of the clothes she had outgrown. She refuses to part with almost anything--"the memorieeeeeees!" (shades of her grandfather)--so I just went in while she was otherwise occupied and sifted through her closet. A lot of clothes went to charity, but she had ripped the knees out of all her jeans, so they weren't donate-able. I couldn't see throwing away 5 pairs of jeans, so I cut them into strips
(the whiskey cannister became the spool for the finished "thread" later) and crocheted them into a rag rug for my kitchen.
That was a whole day of work.
I managed to talk Hannah into giving away her dress-up clothes (heads up to Lil Sis and Jooge: she wants them to go to your little ones), but that meant sorting them and packaging them to go in the mail, whenever that happens. That also meant that I had now freed up two shelves in her closet.
She wanted me to convert her tall play bed into a regular low bed, but first we had to figure out where to put all the stuff (so.much.stuff) that had been under the play bed. Four days of cleaning and sorting resulted in a low bed and a half-empty room, plus a yard-trimming-sized bag of garbage plus 5 other shopping bags worth of garbage. Plus a bunch of mini-electronics (I hate you, McDonald's) that had to go to the special recycling center instead of the garbage can. Plus the rest of the play bed parts that had to be wrapped up and put in the cellar.
Once we had her room under control, it was time to go shopping for a desk to go in it. We headed down south to the opposite end of town from where we live, where we:
1. bought 2 months worth of cat litter,
2. bought a desk and chair and sought in vain for something else for Hannah's bed,
3. bought a mixer, a blender, a kitchen radio, and an MP3 player (I lost mine in Texas, probably on the plane on the way there), and
4. bought corn chips.
As you can see, we have to take advantage of the long trek to do several errands at once.
I put the chair together that night and the desk the next day. Of course, I put it together wrong on the first try (damned unlabeled parts) and had to redo part of it. grrr... Then I had a big pile of cardboard to get rid of, also at the special recycling place. The whole project felt like dealing with the Hydra. And now that I've written it all out, I am almost as tired as when I actually did it. Actually, I just finished the last thing (trip to the recycling place) this morning, so I guess I have a right to feel that tired.
And on that note, I'm off to bed.
