So, it's been a while. As I've told several people in the past few weeks, life got in the way, big time. A little background: my father was diagnosed with a form of leukemia just before Lu was born. It was pretty dicey at the time, and he went into an experimental treatment program that we joked was the Freemasonry of chemo: rather than killing the bad cells, they made them into good ones. We were out of the woods there for a while. When I flew out with Lu in June of last year, he was on the upswing, finally ditching the walker and having enough immunity to go to a buffet. He stayed on the upswing for about a year, and then it started changing. This summer, he was diagnosed with acute leukemia and told there was nothing left they could do, since he had a weak heart. We had already scheduled a trip out to Michigan for the end of the summer, since it had been obvious for a while that travel was not in the cards. I decided we could swing another trip out earlier in the summer, and so we booked a week at the end of July. And then it got worse, and Mother asked us to come sooner. Thus, we spent the last two weeks of July in my hometown.
Dad died the day after I got back to California, and J came with us to Michigan for the memorial. We lost the fight, and it's a bit like any time your team loses--it's sad, and you try to focus on the games you won and how well you played this particular game. We had more years than we ever expected, and I know that we made him very happy over the years, but it still hurts. I don't have my Dad anymore, and while, I have many wonderful people in my life, none of them can change that fact.
Mom wanted a little company and some unquestioning labor for the end of August, so we kept our original tickets and went back. This time, we went through closets and dressers and organized the office. Like any time you're dealing with that kind of situation, we dealt with what we felt we could, and left the rest for the time being. Masonic rituals and paraphernalia were collected into one area to be sent back to the organizations, suits and dress shirts were packed to go to siblings and the Costume Shop, medications were given to the free clinic and the police to dispose of, and the suitcases were cleared out and checked. It doesn't seem like much, but Mom now has a couple clear closets to work from, and the easiest stuff to decide on (non sentimental clothes, medications that could do good things for other people, and stuff that really didn't belong to us) got cleared.
Now I'm home again (jiggity-jigg!) and have gone on several interviews. Now it's just a waiting game. Hopefully one of them calls with a fantastic job for me, so I can stop worrying about everything. Mom let me go through her box of old fabric, so I have an entire suitcase of vintage materials, some already cut out into projects. I have ideas for some of it, that's certain. I think, though, that I'm hitting a point where I need to create a whole bunch of things before anything more can come into the sewing room.
Oh! And I fit the mock-up! I'll cut it out in fashion fabric this weekend, and then put it together. It fit pretty well, considering that the model was smaller-busted than my dress form, and one of her shoulders is markedly higher than the other. Whoo-hoo for fitting!
I've been cleaning through the house at a slow pace. I've realized that all the books and articles I've read about organization can be boiled down into a few basic principles:
1. Have less stuff than storage.
2. Give everything a home, so you can find it again.
3. Put everything back in its home when you're done using it.
4. Get everyone who lives with you to do the same thing.
Sounds easy, no? Surely I will be Martha Stewart by this time next week! There's nothing holding me back but me! Me and my issue with buying supplies when I'm worried about money--if I buy one more tube of toothpaste, J will probably want to have a "talk" with me. And by "talk," I mean "intervention."
On that note, I need to shred some more paper. And label some more boxes. And file something. Anything.
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