Spring Cleaning
What I've been working on, in a slow and sleepy fashion:
Meanwhile, Brad has been doing epic levels of sorting and cleaning, hauling things to the recycling center, and in general making everything better. As we get deeper into the house, every room takes longer to do, so that's been eating a lot of our "off" weekends in addition to additional batch cooking so we can eat out of the freezer on our scheduled weekends. In particular he's been moving all of the books into the front room and doing the first pass on them so I can do a second pass sort on them. This week he cleared out the big ugly built-in bookshelf in the bedroom of old VHS tapes so we could move books there. We aim to eventually rip that shelf out and repaint the bedroom, but that's a project for another day.
Todo:
- Furniture shopping, with the help of both my mother and Brad.
- First pass of backups. Hitting the stuff that I would cry without such as music I don't have CDs for (Amazon Cloud is good for this) and the itunes DB. Also miscellanea such as LOTRO settings that are annoying to rebuild from scratch. Most of our games are in the cloud, music exists on cds, etc. so it's mostly time consuming and annoying if we have a big crash... I'm handling that with some replication to other computers in the house, plus strategic use of cloud services for stuff that's a real pain to do without.
- Reviving music from crashed computer: this took some doing but is pretty much done. I've copied it over to the bedtop as I am too tired to use the desktop nowadays. Another copy resides on the external drive, and I'm working out ways to sync any new music to Brad's system. This would be easier if they were on the same LAN but that's going to have to wait. The iTunes database is automatically backed up, so worst case I have to re-rip stuff. Amazon Cloud Player is helpful from here on out because it stores a copy of any purchased music in the cloud. I've synced some downloaded stuff (pre-cloud Amazon, mix lists, etc.) up to them. It's nice to be able to use this new service, so I'm glad I didn't invest in any DRMed music!
- Uploading photos (I had a year's backlog; now I'm up to April). Also, working out more robust backup procedures as it would be sad to lose them. At this point everything is in the cloud, at least -- I just want to regularly sync flickr back down so I don't lose my metadata if Yahoo is Yahoo-like with flickr.
- Keeping track of the handyman tasks. (That's quiet now as we wait for the new shower fixtures to replace the leaky ones.) He's replaced a bunch of light fixtures and done many minor repairs around the house.
- Sorting books. Most of these are ending up in my to-read (or to-reread) stack because my memory is so cruddy that I can't remember them well enough to know if we want to keep them or not. However some are getting filtered into either unequivocally keep or unequivocally go piles. I'm about halfway through the fiction and maybe... 1/8th through the nonfiction?
- Getting rid of gaming books. (In progress; many people have dibsed so I should poke for how/when/etc.)
Meanwhile, Brad has been doing epic levels of sorting and cleaning, hauling things to the recycling center, and in general making everything better. As we get deeper into the house, every room takes longer to do, so that's been eating a lot of our "off" weekends in addition to additional batch cooking so we can eat out of the freezer on our scheduled weekends. In particular he's been moving all of the books into the front room and doing the first pass on them so I can do a second pass sort on them. This week he cleared out the big ugly built-in bookshelf in the bedroom of old VHS tapes so we could move books there. We aim to eventually rip that shelf out and repaint the bedroom, but that's a project for another day.
Todo:
- Continue with decluttering; right now it's book sorting and then probably the back room.
- Eat down the pantry; I found a bunch more stuff that we don't eat very often so shouldn't keep as a staple.
- Set up the new furniture when it arrives. Excited about the prospect of having some real storage space!
- Find permanent homes for All The Things. This is key to the goal of keeping the house free of clutter after it's been cleaned.
- Sort clothes. This is a more terrible job than it sounds like as my clothes are horribly disorganized, with my wardrobe being mostly unexamined since before I got sick since I've been too exhausted to cope with it.