P365 - Day 51 - it's been one of those days

One of those days when I wish I’d never got out of bed and can’t wait to be over.

It probably didn’t help that I didn’t really get up. I did that thing where I stay in my PJs, laze around, do a few incidental things, have too many coffees and a late breakfast, and generally act like a sloth.

Eventually I decided to tackle a project that has been sitting on my lounge room floor for several weeks. All my old photos are either sitting in those bad self-adhesive albums that we all know are a no-no for photos or stashed in shoe boxes.

I had decided to buy some archival negative sleeves and photo boxes so that I could keep them, if not in perfect condition, at least in better condition than under the spare bed. So they arrived a few weeks ago and I made a start on pulling the photos out of the albums, putting them with the rest of the photos from that film and matching up the relevant negative strips.

Fun, not.

Doing this was one part of the larger project to completely declutter the junk room study and make it a useable space. However, the study/spare room/library/however you describe it is somewhat overgrown (a bit like the back yard) and so there wasn’t enough room to do this in there, so out to the lounge room it all came.

And as I was hunched over all these photos and negatives on the floor, trying to work out which photos went where, and which negatives belonged to which photos it all became too much.

I should be doing this stuff on a decent sized table where I can actually spread stuff out and see what I’m doing. How am I supposed to ever get this done? It’s just too hard.

And I went into the study and had a look around at the mess in there and all the stuff we didn’t get rid of in the garage sale and wondered how the hell am I ever going to do this. I need to clean up to make space, but I need space to be able to clean and organise.

My logical mind knows that I just have to keep plugging away even if it’s only one shelf, one drawer or one piece of the floor. (Incidentally, as I was writing this, I was browsing some of my favourite sites and, by happy coincidence, what should be the topic of the day on the Happiness Project but fighting clutter one shelf at a time.)

But even if I do this, the trick, and the hard thing for me, is once a space has been cleared to keep it that way. And if other stuff doesn’t have a proper home, it will make its way back to my nice clear area.

So the problem really never goes away! I have to stay on top of it all the time or everything will go back to the way it was before.

And after my little meltdown, I didn’t really feel like doing anything else for the rest of the day. I’m sure it was compounded by the horrible weather, which has just arrived out of nowhere, especially the wind, which was really grating on me today. The noise was really getting to me and it seemed to amplify everything else that upset me today.

So I spent time with Juniordwarf, tried not to feel guilty about the lack of progress today and put it down to being one of those days. Tomorrow will be better.