Today I turned forty-two, which as we all know, is the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.  (Read Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy if you don’t believe me.)  Alas, I feel no wiser than yesterday, but at least it’s a cool age to be, if only for a year!

Being a notorious party girl, of course,  I celebrated by installing shelves in my closet, sorting out piles of random stuff, and running a bazillion house-related errands.  Fully organizing my studio is proving elusive!  Just as I think I’ve got a handle on it, more Stuff creeps out of a corner.  And setting up new infrastructure (like the shelves) to organize the Stuff can easily take half a day.

But I am working patiently at it, organizing things and tying up loose ends.  A website/service called Trello has been a wonderful support for me in keeping track of the to-dos – it’s basically a Web-based Scrum board, listing tasks in columns (default is “To Do”, “Doing”, and “Done”).  Tools like this are a dime a dozen these days, but the wonderful thing about Trello is its pure simplicity – click in a column, type in the task, hit return, and you’re done.  And you can drag and drop to reorder the tasks, or move them from one column to another.  That simple.

Anyway, I’ve been using Trello with four columns: “To Do Later”, “To Do Today”, “Doing”, and “Done”.  This lets me keep track of all the things I’d like to do eventually, but focus on the things I’m actually doing today.  “Doing” shows what I have in progress, and the “Done” column tracks shows what I’ve finished.  (It’s totally unnecessary, but it cheers me up to see the “Done” column growing!)  I really like it.

Tomorrow Mike and I are going up to San Francisco to celebrate my birthday.  (We’d have gone tonight, but the SF Giants are playing a home game tonight, and neither of us felt like contending with 10,000 baseball enthusiasts.)  We’re going to one of my favorite restaurants – a Japanese sukiyaki and shabu-shabu place.  I adore sukiyaki, especially when it’s cooked at the table, and I’ve missed this restaurant badly ever since we moved out of the city.  So we’re going there.  It’s not fancy, but it’s comfort food, and it will be a nice place to celebrate.

Back to organizing samples!  I put away about 150 samples yesterday before running out of sheet protectors, but more sheet protectors and binders arrived today, and I still have an eight-inch stack to contend with.  Hopefully I can finish those up by the time Mike finishes fixing some stuff around the house, and then we can go off for sushi and some wonderful Indian ice cream, in lots of exotic flavors.

Yesterday I went on an unpacking rampage, and processed about 2/3 of the boxes in the living room and rearranged the garage.  Now we can reach the sofa in the living room (which was previously barricaded with boxes), and the boxes in the garage are efficiently packed and organized by content types, so we can actually find things we’re looking for.  They are not unpacked yet, though, because I need Mike’s input and help with organizing his items.  That will likely have to wait for the weekend.

On the bright side, however, it appears likely that I will actually be able to use the loom soon.  (That was why I rearranged the garage!)  There are things packed on either side, and I’ll have to run an extension cord for electricity, but I think I have enough space to throw a shuttle.  A few repairs will need to be made first, but nothing too difficult.

Most of my stuff is now unpacked – the boxes that remain are mostly Mike’s stuff, which he will have to unpack and organize himself.  I’m guesstimating that I have another half-day’s worth of unpacking (random/miscellaneous items from dining and living rooms, plus cleaning up my studio) and then I’ll be DONE DONE DONE!  Which means I’ll finally be able to start fiber work again.  Hallelujah.

And here is the latest zucchini photo:

It’s getting harder and harder to show the entire plant, and to give an accurate idea of how fast the thing’s growing.  So here is a single tendril.  Five days ago, it was barely encroaching on the patio, and now look at it!

It’s grown at least two feet in the last five days.  Egad!

And here is something equally ominous and exciting:

Yes!  It is starting to bear its first fruits.  Let the flood of zucchini commence!

I’ve spent the last two days furiously unpacking both studio and the rest of the house.  To my utter astonishment, I now have the studio roughly in order – there is only one half-empty moving box yet to be filed.  Admittedly, there is a big pile of stuff on the table, and an ominously large stack of samples in a corner pile that need to be dealt with – some from Complex Weavers sample exchanges, some my own that need to be categorized and filed.  The stack of samples and other stuff that needs dealing with is about eighteen inches high, though some of those are large items that take up more space.  The actual mass of samples is “only” about five inches tall.

Here is a photo of the most interesting corner (the studio is too small to take a photo of the entire room):

I’m pretty pleased with myself – the organization is quite different (and more efficient!) than what I had previously.  Thread is hung neatly in storage boxes on the wall, random objects like pins, sewing machine needles, etc. are housed in the many-drawered cabinet underneath the table.  Previously they had been strewn randomly across the craft table, or precariously teetering in baskets on the pegboard (where I could never find them).  While there is still quite a bit of random stuff to put away, at least now I have an organizational scheme, and a place to put everything.  As a friend said once, “Now I have an ‘away’ to put.”

(The cabinet-with-drawers, by the way, is new: I bought it from Ikea yesterday.  While Ikea is not known for its fine furniture (I bought it because it was cheap and I was broke), I do adore buying things from Ikea because it’s so much fun to assemble the furniture.  Their instructions are clear, simple, and precise, making assembly quick, neat, and satisfying.  It’s like putting together a small jigsaw puzzle: it’s so much fun to find each piece and put it in the right spot, and then there’s the final “click” as the last piece goes ceremoniously in place.  Delightful!)

I’m also pleased with myself because I had worked out the layout down to the last inch, and to my surprise, it worked!  In particular, I had calculated that there I could fit both table and bookcase against one wall, with just one inch of wall to spare.  I was worried about mis-measurement, but in fact they both fit, with 3/4 inch to spare!  I got it exactly right.  Happiness.

Now, of course, there is the rest of the house, which is still full of boxes.  (A girl has to have her priorities!)  Actually I have unpacked quite a few boxes, but you’d never know it by looking: the living room is jam-packed with boxes of books, and the kitchen is in an awful state of disorder.  I suspect that we have more things to put away than the cabinets will actually hold, and then there is the small matter of organizing the stuff that will fit.  I hadn’t tackled the kitchen because Mike was still installing the dishwasher (there’s nothing like trying to unpack around a Giant Box occupying a quarter of the kitchen), but he finished it last night (yay!) and so I will tackle the kitchen today.  After that I will unpack the living room, and only then do I tackle the garage.

I’m glad I took a week off!  I don’t think I’ll be done unpacking until Thursday or Friday.