Setbacks and Leaps Forward

 Sunday had its ups and downs, but before I move on to an update of Sunday's accomplishments I didn't want to forget the laundry.  It was pointed out that I didn't fully explain my processes, only my schedule, besides I need to point out that as of 4:30am Monday morning my children still haven't gathered their clean clothes from there even though they've had since FRIDAY to get them.  I will be loudly bitching soon, but I have enough courtesy not to wake people up this early only because my youngest grandson is asleep in their room and my oldest grandson upstairs hasn't been feeling well.  It's frustrating as hell to have to yell at grown-ass adults to do something as simple as put away your clean clothes.  And let's be clear the only thing they need to do is put them away all the clothes are either neatly hung or neatly folded.  It's a 30-second task, okay well maybe a little more than that but it doesn't take that much time.  Even though I never request it until Friday, my husband grabs our clothes on his way in the door after work and gets them to put away so the stacks of stuff to put away stay small.  

Anyway, my laundry room set-up. First, you know those white racks that connect to the wall? I have one on one side with a bar and one on the other without that I still hang things on.  Don't quote me on the length. I have no sense of measurement.  That's my husband's department.  I'm going to try to give you links to a general idea of what I have in there, except hangers because dude, if you can't find hangers, you have bigger issues than how I put together my laundry room.  The one with the bar is where I hang the clean clothes, across from that is the one where I put some of the empty hangars.  I'm really big in yard sales, so everyone in my home has a decent-sized wardrobe.  I like to have enough clothes in every wardrobe that if I get sick for a week or so they still have clothes.  Everyone in my house has a minimum of two weeks' worth of clothes, usually a lot more than that.  That means I need a lot of hangers.  But on the rack without the bar are my top hangers, which are the clear kind with the metal hook, my pants hangers which are just black plastic hangers, the boys pants hangers which are the kind with the clips on the end, and children's hangers for the grandchildren.  Hanging in the back of that rack along the wall are closet sorter hangers for regular clothes and for pants.  On the shelves above are household supplies like paper towels or lightbulbs, since my laundry doubles as the cleaning supplies storage.  Below the hanger side, I have those stick-on-the-wall plastic hooks with a bunch of delicates bags hanging on them. Below the clean clothes are my sorters. I used to have stationary sorters that my husband built for me, but after a few moves; I realized stationary sorters don't always fit well into the available space, so I switched to pop-up hampers. I have a big family, as I mentioned, so I use five for the loads I described yesterday.  I also keep two or three of the smaller size folded up between those and the laundry room table on the adjacent wall.  The smaller hampers are for the family to use for their dirty clothes that don't fit in their hampers when they're bringing them down. they pull it out pop it up and throw the unsorted clothes in because inevitably they will mess up my sorting or forget to check pockets if they sort it themselves.  I want to do my own sorting.  I have them place it against the linen closet toward the opening of the room. But even if they left it in the room, the smaller hampers look nothing like my sorters, so I will not miss them.  

As you can see if you click through on the link, my laundry room table is just a simple folding table, again I have no idea if the one in the link is the same size, it is the same color though.  This sits below some cupboards that store cleaning supplies for the rest of the house.  In the corner beside it, is my vacuum and mop with a bucket, and sitting on top of those is an overflow tote without a lid for hangers that don't fit in their homes.  This is the messiest part of the room but I don't have the space to spread out more without cutting into the room to move between the machines and sorting area.  Sometimes you have to compromise, you know?  Under the table, I have two of those half hamper/half basket baskets because mine at least has a higher solid part on the bottom to keep dirt out so I can keep them on the floor without worrying about things getting dirty.  On the table are two regular baskets, and above the table, hanging from the cupboard, are two pop-up baskets. This is where all my folded clothes go.  The ones on the table are both for couples so I don't need eight baskets I only need six and with having the small children's stuff in hanging baskets there's just enough space for everything to fit.  I put linens directly in the linen closet and stack towels on top of the washer to get put away by the person who cleans the bathrooms.  

The opposite wall has my washer and dryer, which, because of the way the hookups are made, are connected in the opposite order to how you'd imagine them, and between those in a narrow shelving unit. (mine is brown with four shelves but a similar design) On the shelves between them are my laundry soap, fabric softener, bleach, and all those other laundry-related tools on the top two shelves, and below are random cleaning supplies.  The top of my washer has nothing on it because like I said that's where I put the towel when they're waiting to be put away.  On my dryer, I have two baskets and three hanger sorters. Everyone in my house has different color hangers.  Mine are clear for top, black for pants, one my children has white plastic hangers with clip pants hanger, another has green with clip pants hangers, the other uses only blue plastic pants hangers and the kids use children's hangers and the smaller clip pants hangers. I have a method to my madness, not only does everyone using different hangers prevent people from grabbing the wrong clothes if they're not paying attention, it tells me at a glance who hasn't collected their clothes and who's hoarding my empty hangers.  And it's partially a setup for when they finally move out.  I won't need a million and one hangers for just my spouse and myself. So when they move out, they'll take their color of hangers and their sorter for hangers with them.  It's one less thing they'll have to buy when they're on their own, and it comes with an organizational method for keeping track of it. (Just a quick FYI. I'm not affiliated with any of the links. I just needed a means of showing you what I'm talking about, so I don't care whether you decide to buy and mimic.) The baskets, if you're wondering, are for socks.  I don't do socks.  I put them neatly in rows in the basket to be sorted by my husband or my daughter.  He won't sort their socks because they're supposed to be the parents.  So one basket has mine, my spouses and my sons and the other has my daughter's, her husband's and her children's.  Even if I was going to do them, I'd still use a sock basket because I wouldn't want to take the time sorting them while the rest of the whites are getting wrinkled in the dryer.  

So anyway, that's every detail you need to know about my laundry that a friend of mine asked me to be more specific about.  Yes, I have been anal about the way I set up my laundry room for years. That's not anything new. I just now have a schedule to go with the setup.  

Now on to yesterday, I didn't even get to writing. I was too tired by the time the day ended.  But I'm still pretty happy with the day.  I told you yesterday about how my office was a catchall that had spilled into my husband's office, making both rooms fairly hard to use.  So I knew just looking at the amount of stuff that this is not something that gets put away and cleaned up in one go.  It's just too daunting.  I bought three extra-large totes with the idea that if everything would fit into those and I could find a place that's both out of the way and easy to access, I'd finally be able to start working on my office.  My husband helped me with this project but we managed to get everything but the picture totes to fit in these totes and find a place to stack them that's out of the way for both of us and easy for me to get to so once I get the room ready to put stuff in it I can work at the totes maybe a half-hour or hour a day until they're emptied.  The room is finally at a place where it actually can be cleaned because there's no longer too much stuff blocking the places that need to be cleaned.  I'm pretty excited about that. 

On the downside, I still have my daughter's tote full of winter clothes in the middle of my office.  I asked her months ago to get it out of here. There's also a walker because I often have my grandson and a yoga ball I should use but never do, that I'm considering deflating and getting out of here just to get the space back. It's the tote that's really bothering me because it's not a small tote and it's in the way.  I could serve a children's tea party on this tote. It needs to go.  

But just to point out how big a deal this is, with the way things were before this project, walking through my husband's office felt like walking through a storage closet, and sadly, everyone has to walk through there. Our offices are supposed to be one dining room between the kitchen and the living room, but we needed space for our computers and bookcases and the kitchen was large enough to fit the dining room table.  We're not social people so it's not like we're having regular guest dinners, at the time when we moved in we were only a family of four because my daughter was seeing if the grass was greener at her Dad's house for a year.  She determined it was not greener and came home the following year.  But that's not the point. We didn't really need a dining room. We'd lived without much of one in our previous apartment, we didn't have a ton of dining room furniture.  What we needed was space to store around 12 bookcases, two computer desks, and four large filing cabinets.  So my eight cherry bookcases were turned back to back to form a pseudo wall and two offices were made.  I don't actually know how many bookcases my husband has against the opposite wall. I think it's four, but I've never actually counted or paid attention. I probably should someday.  Anyway, since I use my computer more with a bigger purpose for it, or at least bigger dreams for it, I got the tucked-away side that nobody really needs to go through and he got the pseudo hallway side people have to walk through. 

So the fact that his side is now a wide-open space adorned with well-decorated bookcases instead of stacks of baskets and boxes filled with junk and stuff piled on those is a vast improvement to the state of the house.  The fact that if my daughter took her stuff and her baby's stuff out of here, my side would only look a little cluttered because of all the decorations I've pulled down to be dusted and re-homed is a major milestone.  

My goals for the day include:

• Putting her tote in the middle of her bed if she doesn't move it herself
• Re-shelving the books that were tucked on their sides on the shelf because it's a lot of work to shelve new books in my collection. I have too many physical books for the task to be simple. (And yes, Marie Kondo, all my books make me happy they're hardcover, and more than half are autographed) 
• Cleaning and dusting all the decorations that are mostly gathered on my desk.
• Cleaning and dusting all the stuff on the walls and fixing that map frame that keeps popping apart just to irritate me. 
• Cleaning and dusting all the surfaces.
• Sweeping and mopping the floor
• Giving all my decorations homes in my office
• Putting away the stuff that didn't fit in the three totes (which are large totes of pictures that get tucked under my desk until I have the time to scan them all. Someday.)

It looks like a lot and will probably take at least a couple hours, but it's not as much as it sounds like.  Or at least that's what I'm trying to convince myself.  I'm tired of waiting for my office to look like my office again. I need a space in this house that's just mine to feel human again.  To feel like me.  The stuff in the totes I'd be happy to take my time about.  I mean it will be a pain when I need something I can't find, but so such is life.  At least the room will look like an office instead of a dumping ground.  If my office is a reflection of myself, it would go a long way toward explaining why I've felt just yucky for months now.  Maybe if I have space of my own that I can actually use again I'll start to feel like I'm not so smothered in my current life.  Don't get me wrong, I love my children and my grandchildren and of course my spouse, they're my world. But they can't be my entire world and they have been for more than twenty years now.  It's time to include something else in that world, too. It's time to make a little space for me and what I want and need. 

Here's the thing they never tell you is a massive lie.  When you're young and you have children, you're told repeatedly to make everything about them. Put them first because your time is going to come when they're grown. That's a lie.  When they're grown in this economy, it's going to take them a bit to get on their feet and live apart from you, so they aren't immediately moving out because they have to get into a position where they can actually afford to. (Even then life will hit them hard a few times and they'll have to come back and start again) And then they're going to start multiplying because they're having offspring which they need help raising because they can't afford not to have both of them working and daycare in this day and age is ridiculously overpriced.  I understand that daycare workers need to eat too, but dude, there's not much left to a paycheck after paying them.  So if you want your kids to get ahead and not have to live with you forever, you'll need to help with watching your grandkids, which means even though you didn't start over, you started over.  Except now, when you've reached this stage of life where your kids are grown, they are still young enough to need regular advice on entering adulthood and the things they encounter there and your grandkids require the same amount of attention your kids did so it's like you've now gotten more kids to put ahead of yourself.  That promised you time, it's NOT coming.  You will always be needed by someone to do something. So if you're reading this and you're young, take an hour a day and make it about you.  Carve out a little bit of time that's yours, take it now, take it anytime you can because the promised land doesn't exist.  I'm not saying don't prioritize your kids and make sure their needs are met.  Definitely do that, it's an important part of parenting, but stop trying to convince yourself that if you do this now if you shelf all your wants, needs, and dreams now, twenty years from now you'll be looking back at all the things you didn't do because of that mindset that you'll realize you're never going to get to do because that being needed that expectation that you will go last, it NEVER ends. And it's not just me saying this I've discussed this with a few friends whose kids are all legal adults now, and they're in the same place I am, asking when their time is coming.  I have a friend whose almost retirement age that still has her life revolving entirely around her adult child.  Maybe in yesteryear, this was the case, but it's not anymore because it's not as easy to survive anymore.  The cost of living increases are not matched by the average wage.  That's probably not going to get better as time goes on, it's probably only going to get worse, so if you're young start making a point of carving out that time now.  Make a part of the day about you, even if like I said above it's only an hour, it will make a world of difference. 

Now that I've made that PSA back to the path to getting organized.  I think I have my Research Library Template finished, at least for now.  I currently can't think of anything else I'd like to add to it.  I mean, I may come across a link or two to add to the links page, but that sort of adjustment will only take a couple of seconds.  Otherwise, it's pretty much done. Also on a side note, I recently added Pro Writing Aide to my browser, and it's driving me nuts.  Sometimes I just want to use a passive verb.  I often like the way I word things, even if there's a better way to say it because that's my voice coming through.  All these freaking lines through my text from the grammar police are getting on my nerves.  

I worked on the Expense Template and ran into some snags there.  I thought because of some menu items that Scrivener had math capabilities.  What it has is accessibility for a plug-in called MathType.  That particular plug-in is a subscription service that costs $49.99 a year per user.  I'm SO not going to pay that.  Especially not for a template that I'm not going to use for at least a year or two and even then only occasionally.  That's said I'm not giving up.  I downloaded a program called LibreCalc, and I learned that I can drag a spreadsheet into Scrivener to save.  I already knew you could do that. It doesn't open in Scrivener; it opens in a LibreCalc pop-up window.  Here's the interesting part.  I can make changes and update, save it in LibreCalc and it updates in the file in Scrivener too.  It's not perfect, it's not ideal, and it's not what I have in mind, but it will work.  The problem is I haven't even used Excell since I was a teenager, so I don't remember how to use a spreadsheet program and make it do the math that I want this one to do.  This means I now need to take the time to learn LibreCalc so I can explain how to use the spreadsheets saved in my template.  I want to take the time to make the spreadsheets do all the math you'd need as a published, working writer.  

My goals include:

• A tally sheet for what you've spent prior to publishing your first novel to provide a sales goal for breaking even.
• A sheet that helps you calculate the percentage of your home that is your home office and then takes that percentage and lets you plug in the bills you can claim and automatically tells you what percentage of those bills you can claim.  I'm not explaining this right.  In my research, I've learned that the percentage of space your home office takes up in your house is the percentage of your monthly bills like rent, electricity, and internet you can claim.  So I'd like a spreadsheet or calculator program that first tells you okay this is the percentage of the house that your office takes up, and this is the amount on the bill you can claim.  
• A note of warning about what can be inside the office you're claiming as in if you've got any personal items in there and the IRS shows up for an audit they can say it doesn't fit the business test.  I didn't entirely understand that because seriously, lots of people have personal crap in their real business offices, so why wouldn't you have it in your home office? I need to do more research on that.
• Some sort of hobby test, because if you don't earn enough from writing and try to make writing associated write-offs of self-employment on taxes, apparently they can claim you're actually a hobbyist and ding your taxes on that.  Again, I need to research this more.
• Some sort of itemized list of all the stuff you can claim. Every article seems to mention different things.  

Basically, I want this template to let me do the work making the template and then afterward do the work for me with keeping up with anything financial I'm going to need tax-wise.  I want to do the research now, so it's not a worry later when I want to be focusing on my story. 

I'm also considering looking into if there's a way to make a template that manages the author's website and promotion.   If I can make every aspect of what an author needs to do into a template that just handles most of it, then when I actually get to the writing phase, it ceases to be a worry. I want to create templates now so that eventually I can just write and get lost in that.  But that's just something in the back of my head.  Anyway, I worked on that. I didn't make a hell of a lot of progress because I encountered a bunch of roadblocks.

Since the spouse was home, I didn't have to clean the bedroom yesterday. Now that I've made it so easy he doesn't mind being the one to do it on his days off. It's ten minutes, it's easy, and it's definitely worth the effort because our lovely, clean room is a comfortable oasis where we can escape from the rest of the very busy house.  I kept up with email and bookmarks so that was good but didn't really get to the task of writing because by the time I got there I was so tired I could barely keep my eyes open.  

Here's hoping that a clean office makes a clean mind and I can catch up on my NaNoWriMo project.  I put my Pacemaker counter on the bar, and that's the goal to draft the entire planned series before the end of next December.  I'd add a widget for NaNoWriMo, but I can't seem to find one, not that I'm making impressive leaps and bounds there.  I am adding to notes here and there usually on my phone that still need to be updated in the project, but I'm doing it, that should count for something.  Also, I seem to have screwed something up with combining my template in progress with the NaNoWriMo one because it keeps telling me I've written 0 words even when I write some, so I'll have to eventually take a look at that.  But for today that's my update on yesterday. 

It's a slow journey to getting organized and getting what I want in life, but at least I'm starting to finally make it right?

 Update: Now that I know how to make slideshows. I made one of the laundry room.  It's midweek and I like to set up the load for the next day when I'm finished with the current day so it looks a little messy, but it's actually organized chaos.  And I do have two sock baskets but my daughter takes forever to sort hers and I use what container is handy on the weeks I don't get the sock basket back.