Organizing

I have tried to "relax" while I've been on vacation over the holidays. I have tried to just sit still and watch a movie and chillllllllllllllll.

I can't do it for long periods of time or I start to feel like I will jump right out of my skin.

M can sit and watch TV for hours. Yesterday she flipped between several college football games and the SciFi channel which was having a Twilight Zone marathon. My day was spent taking down the minimal Christmas decorations I finally put up on Christmas eve. Lugging all that up into the attic and then I started to tackle the basement.

The basement is: my office, my little painting studio, my napping place, the exercise room the entertainment room when my kids were younger complete with pool table, video games, board games and a popcorn machine! The basement is not finished, but it's not too bad the way it is. All that really needs would be to add a drop ceiling and paint the walls and would be a cool space. (I always had dreams of hiring some local graffiti artists to paint the walls for me. )

The basement is also "the dumping ground". If you don't know where to put something in my house it invariably ends up down here somewhere. Mostly on the un-used pool table.

When we first moved into this house - over 7 years ago, we loved this huge empty room! Never did we think we could junk it up so quickly!

But we did and now it's just gotten out of hand!

There are 8 different bookcases or shelving scattered about which some more of the other 'stuff" gets put. These are what I am trying to conquer now.

M is a book fanatic. She buys "boxes" of books on e-bay. We go to libraries when they are having their used book sales and she'll come out with bags and bags of books. We were at Walgreens the other day and they had a buy one get one free sale and she left with 4 new books.

She has a collection of Agatha Christie books up in the attic. All of the books she needed for her MBA and her CPA classes are scattered about between our bedroom her office, the attic and the basement.

M's big retirement dream is to read all of the books and watch all of the movies she's bought over the years.

Have I told you that I'm a bit anal retentive? Messes and piles drive me nuts. I like to be organized...it helps me find things better.

So my project now is to organize all of these books - Alphabetically - by author and then alpha by title.

I wish I could take a picture so you could see the mess I've made. (It's all part of the process - trust me). It looks like I'm having a used book sale in my basement. I have piles of books arranged all over my pool table and scattered in about to collapse piles all over the floor.

Now the iTunes will go on shuffle and it's time to get back to it and put all of these books onto a shelf somewhere. I see a trip to Big Lots to see if I can pick up another cheap bookshelf because I won't have enough room in the bookshelves that I have now - but that's part of the fun of all of this believe it or not.