This was yet another hectic week. Work wasn't actually too bad, except for a trip to Los Angeles. I flew out fairly late on Monday, since I didn't want to reschedule a lunch meeting I'd planned a while back. My meeting in L.A. can best be characterized as not as bad as I expected. The person running the meeting has a few phrases he uses repeatedly and I was amused afterwards to find out that one of my colleagues had also been counting the number of times that he said "a la" and "per se."
I should also note that I once again had minor travel annoyances. Avis gave me a Chevy Aveo which is just dreadful ergonomically. It is remarkably difficult to shift. Why have a curved shift path for an automatic transmission car? And, while I have no issues with having to push something to shift, I had to push remarkably hard on the top of the shifter knob to shift into park. Even more annoying was the lack of a dome light. There are map lights but it's hard to find the button for them in the dark.
And then there were the hotel issues. The bigger one being the failure of the elevators. I was on the 5th floor so it would have been very irritating had I had to carry my bags down on Tuesday morning. They'd gotten one working by Tuesday night, so I was spared that. But then the high speed internet in the room, which worked fine on Monday night, wouldn't work on Tuesday night. I spent a long time on the phone with their tech support (after having to call the front desk twice to get the phone to work!) and they concluded the switch at the hotel needed to be reset. I gave up and used dial-up to get to my company network. (And, by the way, when I got home Wednesday, my company network hung up three times before I could fill in my time card with my hours for the day.)
Most of my weekend has been spent cleaning my apartment. I did get out briefly to do a Volksmarch, which I probably wouldn't have were it not very near home. The weather was perfect and it was nice walking around various trails in the parks in Fairfax, but it wasn't terribly exciting. Still, it left me with lots of time for housework. My bedroom is now as good as it's going to get, albeit not exactly sparkling. The living room and bathroom have a ways to go. The kitchen, fortunately, is the thing I'm normally obsessive over, so doesn't need much work. And I can just shut the door to the den. The biggest part of the clean-up has been doing something about all the stacks of photos on bookshelves. See, the company that made the only photo albums I really liked stopped making them. And I've been thinking I really should scan everything for archival purposes and then keep just a small number of photos. While not getting around to that, I've had photos in a holding pattern for too long. Sadly, I didn't always write on the backs what things were before stacking them on the shelves. So I've been labeling as I put them in an actual archival box, which is a better staging area than blocking access to CDs would be.
I've also been putting negatives into sleeves, labeling those with date and place. That's even harder as some of the negatives go back 20 or more years. But it's also less urgent. The key thing on decluttering projects is to take them slowly and not get discouraged. If I can do an hour or so a day, it will get done eventually. The catch being that I will inevitably get distracted and work on some other project, e.g. finishing the back-stitching on a needlepoint that I finished everything else on at least 2 years ago. That's what life is like for those of us with short attention spans.
Copyright 2006 Miriam H. Nadel