this little life of mine

I am SO sorry for not posting here lately, my lovely readers, but I've been just SO DANG BUSY lately (and, as a result SO DANG TIRED), that I just haven't been able to muster up the energy to write. At this very moment, things are a little calmer, but for the next month or so I'll still be very busy, so I'm not sure how much blogging I'll get done. Still. I will try.

For now, here's a quick five-bullet update for your Friday:

1.  This past weekend, inspired by Marie Kondo's Tidying book, my mom and I tackled the den, and by tackle I mean emptied all the bookshelves, put the books that "inspired joy" in 4 plastic bins*, and put the books that didn't inspire joy in approximately 10 paper grocery bags to be turned in to the used book store. (Yes, I had a LOT of books!) Then, we went through the craft armoire and I dumped, donated, or recycled tons of blank, patterned, and coloured paper, blank cards, several containers of glitter, embossing powder, and acrylic paints, stamping and crafting magazines, and various office supplies such as glue sticks, liquid white out, paper clips, and push pins, that we simply don't need tons of.

Some of it was hard (The books! THE BOOOOKKS!), some of it was easy, but all of it was necessary, and I am feeling pretty good about my choices. I still have quite a few items I need to scan before shredding (old web articles, photocopies of craft/stamping/gardening/etc. ideas/journal snippets, and novel ideas), but this little hand-held scanner I bought for, like, fifty bucks or whatever, is doing a pretty quick job of it all!

2.  Tuesday I went to the hospital and was injected with a radioactive tracer, then had a bone scan which will hopefully show my rheumatologist exactly where all the inflammation is in my body. Which means hopefully soon I'll get a firm diagnosis and can begin treatment, and get my life back. Or not. It's entirely possible that I will NOT get my life back; that this is the New Normal, and then I'll just have to deal with it, I guess.  In any event, I'm planning to pick up a copy of my results on Saturday, and I'm curious to see what a bone scan looks like!

3. This weekend is going to be pretty busy, too, as not only do we have to take to Goodwill all the stuff we got rid of last weekend, pick up my lab results, and do all our other usual Saturday Stuff, but we have to mow our lawn as well. It looks dreadful! It's brown in places already, but other parts are wildly overgrown. Since we didn't get any rain to speak of this year, we can't really justify getting brand new sod. Also, none of our neighbours seem to give a crap what their overgrown, weed-infested yards look like (except the lady kitty-corner to us, who is also the only homeowner left besides us; everyone else is a renter.), so I guess there's no point in putting any money into it this summer. Still, it's hard to look at because it's just so ugly!

4.  Tonight is the Atascadero Art and Wine Tour, and my mom and I are going. It was supposed to be held last Friday, but at some point they changed the date, and didn't bother announcing it to anyone. (I took a half-day off work, and we planned to get a room at The Carlton Hotel downtown so we could start the Tour right at 5:30 and be able to try all the offerings from all the wineries without worrying about driving home inebriated. At first I was afraid I had just read it wrong, or I was nuts, or the dementia was kicking in early, but it turned out I was not the only one: one of my co-workers, believing it to be March 20th as well, had invited several of her friends to come down for that very event. We didn't discover it had been changed until Tuesday or Wednesday of that week, and she had to call everyone and tell them it wasn't happening.) It'll be interesting to see how many wineries, artists, and food vendors bother showing up since the two art galleries Atascadero even HAD have closed down in the past two months, and the only new stores to open are both thrift stores, and several shops have stopped participating in the past couple years. 

le sigh.

 5. And, finally, here's a picture of some books that once sat on one of my shelves. Some of them will be back. Some will not. Have a great weekend! Cheers!

*The reason the books went in bins to be stored in the garage is that we're planning to get new carpeting fairly soon, and it seemed silly to put the keeper books back on the shelf, only to have to take them down so the shelves could be moved to put in the carpet in, like, a month or so.