“Remoted” – Saturday Two

At home Day 12, aka "Saturday Two" was sunny and productive on several fronts. Coffee and a lazy breakfast of a granola bar accompanied a movie (“The Farewell” – on Prime – it’s “based on an actual lie” and pretty good, check it out).While the movie was on, there was a reorganization of the two living room bookcases under the new “controlling my environment” initiative.

My niece, who is studying cabinetmaking, made me a beautiful bookcase for Christmas, which had not been fulfilling its potential by holding books. Today, the task was completed and the other bookcase in the living room made neater. As a result of the bookcase arranging and rearranging, a box labeled “office” that lived on a shelf in the spare room for the past 3.5 years was also emptied.

The box was part of a separate mission to look for the desktop file holder that used to live on my actual desk in my actual office overlooking my wooded back yard at my house in Tennessee (which I miss more and more lately). The file holder was remembered a few days ago while looking at the mess of papers on my once serene dining table recently stripped of its tablecloth, runner, and silver vase and pressed into service as a desk. The box with the file holder also contained a treasure trove of books which now reside in the beautiful handcrafted, solid wood bookcase. Note: There were six bookcases in my house in Tennessee, so almost every moving box that left the house had books in it.

The newly emptied “office” box is flattened and now in the recycle bin. The place on the chrome shelf in the spare room now holds several framed artworks that had lived across the room leaning against a wall. So much progress!

The recycle bin saw a good bit of action today. In addition to the box marked “office,” several empty shoe boxes are now there, along with the eight Prime and Staples boxes that arrived this week for the eight items ordered via two online orders, and an oversize Kohl’s box that lived in the enclosed front porch since before Christmas. Like all the other empty boxes in the house, it had been saved “in case.”  

Lunch! Powered by veggies
and egg noodles.

After the bookcase arranging, the tiny potatoes and a giant beet from the produce delivery of earlier in the week were roasted. Kale, zucchini, onion, peppers, and diced tomatoes with egg noodles were prepared for lunch. Dishes were cleaned. Fortified by lunch, and fueled by the fires of progress, it was time for the outdoors.

The rake was retrieved from the shed and some of the leaves donated by the back-yard neighbor’s tree were gathered up. Unfortunately, the designated “Yard Waste” barrel was already half-full of trimmed rose branches from having missed the final pickup last fall, so the outdoor clean-up effort was prematurely halted.

Back inside, it was time to deal with paper. So much paper. The clutter in the spare-room-that-should-be-an-office included three boxes of files in serious need of review and disposal. Years worth of job search notes and printed resumes, tax records going back forever, and outdated retirement plan and rollover paperwork from at least four previous employers were taking up space in the file boxes. With all the local document shredding events cancelled under the precautions for COVID-19, that meant busting out the personal paper shredder. It’s labeled “6 sheets maximum” which doesn’t mean it shreds six sheets at a time and instead, more like “after six sheets it needs a 10-minute break,” so it’s going to be a long process. A jig saw puzzle would be more fun right now, but there aren’t any here, so paper shredding for fun and relaxation will have to do.