Cleaning Continues

Whew...my room is beginning to look halfway decent again. Decent enough, in fact, that I think I'll put a few pictures up here. Hey, if trasaric can log his sleep times, I can at least log the cleanliness or lack thereupon of my room. If having company is a compelling reason to make one wish to clean, well, maybe having virtual company will do it for me.

Yes, these photos are fuzzy. I'm using this cheapie little 100K "Yahoo!" branded digital camera, whose rangefinder doesn't always tell the truth and whose pictures are awfully blurred. But hey, it's better than nothing.


This is a new plywood chest of drawers I bought and put together. Had to go back for a hammer, and I maybe didn't get everything nailed together quite perfectly...but it'll do.


I've also put some shelves in, from the same manufacturer, to hold little geegaws and knicknacks, such as my unicorn figurine collection. It's actually two sets of shelves; they stack. Joe helped me put the second one together today. Most annoyingly, when I put the first one together, I accidentally put one of the shelves in upside down. It doesn't really matter too much, though. The stuff on top is going to need to be sorted out and organized sooner or later.


I've put three new stackable drawers between my bed and shelf, where a couple of boxes of videotapes used to be. These ought to be much more useful, and will make a better bedside table, too.


I'm particularly proud of how Joe and I organized this bookshelf, taking all the junk out of the middle two shelves and putting the books back in nice and neat. The third shelf up, where the stuffed unicorn is stuffed in place, had a big old nest of roaches hiding behind some books. Eww.


It's so nice to have a clean floor again. Especially one that's been vacuumed, thanks to the new Hoover.


Of course, there's still some stuff that needs doing. A couple of the surfaces in my room, such as the DVD and tape rack area on top of my dresser. As you can see, there's an awful lot of stuff there.


And I also need to straighten and organize my CDs--as well as the kitchen that you can see beyond it.

Okay, I'll stop inflicting the photos on you. There are a few more on a photo page on my website, though; if you'd like a more complete view at the room as it's been cleaned, or as is yet to be cleaned, that's where to look.

I'll try to rant on the idiocy of "Buy Nothing Day" tomorrow, when I have more energy for it.

Okay, just *one* more picture...

CDs at Ease

Well, I'm up, and I'm listening to the Fellowship of the Ring soundtrack. It's interesting so far. And it reminds me that today I need to take care of the breakfast bar, which is where my CD racks and things are perched. I need to sort out all the CDs that have somehow gotten uncased, find cases for the CD-ROM discs, and get them all into a sort of semblance of order. That's what I've got planned for this morning. After that...maybe I'll tackle the VHS/DVD shelves on top of my bureau.

CDs...hmm. You know, I hardly ever listen to them anymore, now that my radio has been roached to death. Most of my music is the form of MP3s on my hard drive; my computer has become my entertainment center. I can play CDs on it, but in the end it's just as easy to rip them to MP3 and listen to them that way. After all, with MP3s, I can randomize the entire contents of my hard drive, and listen to music for 16 hours or so without ever hearing the same song twice. Let someone with a 5 disc changer try to compete with that! And I can also burn them to CD-ROM, now that I have a CD-RW drive, so even if I don't keep them on my hard drive, I still save space that way.

Given that the fellow from the maid service suggested that anything you hadn't used in the last several weeks, you probably wouldn't need...I wonder if it's time to pack my CDs away and reclaim that space?

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After working on the CD space, I think I'll take that beige box pictured in one of the photos below outside and empty and sort through it. It has the last of my unsorted videotapes--the ones not important enough to me to bear putting in the tape rack--and it seems to have been the unfortunate recipient of a roach colony, and I should get it in good order before taking it home to free more space in my room.

Why do you suppose it is that holiday Snickers always seem to taste much better than the regular Snickers candy bars? The Snickers nutcrackers and hearts (for Valentine's Day) and eggs (for Easter) are just so much more delicious than the ordinary candy bars that it's like eating caviar by comparison. I always want to stock up on them; they're just so tasty. The nougat is softer, the caramel is creamier, and the nuts are crunchier than the ordinary brick-shaped bar. I'd love to know why they can't make their ordinary candy bars this way.

Another spot of cleanness

Okay, I've done some heavy duty sorting and cleaning and stuff. Compare these before and after pics.


Bit of a dramatic improvement, eh? Whew...

I should see if Joe would like to have that wire CD rack. As I recall, I purchased the taller lazy susan because I was tired of using it...and since I don't have enough CDs to fit in it anymore, I should either give it to someone or throw it away and free up the space. (Joe? Get in touch and let me know if you want that, will ya?)

I should probably go ahead and buy some more full-sized jewel cases. I got a bunch of half-height ones by Imation that I use for CD-ROM, but for salvaging cracked full-size jewel cases, there's nothing that can take the place of a full-size, so there's a place to put the insert from the back in there too.

Red tape--videotape

Okay, I yanked the videos out of that box I was talking about. Just as I expected, it was all roaches (mostly dead ones) at the bottom. Thankfully, there's a garden hose with a spray novel hooked up to the neighbor's house, and he doesn't mind if I use it. Now the last of my "unsorted" videotapes are ready for a trip home.

Though it does raise a bit of a question. What do I do with all the rest of my videotapes? I have shelves that are full of them--slowly dwindling as my DVD collection grows and pushes them out, one by one. But that's still an awful lot of them, and as my folks say, there's only a limited amount of space in the house.

It's the same old problem. I don't want to lose or get rid of the stuff, because I might need it someday. And yet...there's just no place to put it. Even if I moved into a bigger house, I still don't know that there would be any place to put it. My folks still have stuff in storage on my Dad's mother's farm from when we lived in Jonesboro, fifteen years ago!

I've been thinking about selling some of the tapes on eBay, though I don't know for sure that I'd even get enough money out of them to cover the bother of putting up the listings and shipping them. For that matter, I seem to have a couple of tapes in my possession that actually belong to my grandfather. I wonder if he misses them.

I think I'll have to put off blathering about Buy Nothing Day until tomorrow, or later.