Change

With the cloud of change seeming to continue to hang over me, I decided to take one of the bulls by the horns today and change some things up. There are these areas of our house that just seem to get in these long ruts of neglect. I went after two of these areas today.

Area #1 – the garden on the side of our house. This used to be filled with these tall plants that covered the side of the house and would flower real nice once a year. Then a few winters ago they all died, so I cut them down – which left all these ugly half dead stumps and a garden filled with roots and weeds and yuck. Last spring I tried to clean it up some and we put in a couple tomato plants. They grew real big and got unorganized and ugly and the rest of the garden looked terrible. Well, today I got out there and worked the place. I took an ax and saw to the stumps, I dug up a bunch of roots, pulled weeds, hoed and raked and got it looking pretty good. Then I smothered the whole garden with mulch. Now, finally, after all these years it looks pretty good. Next we are going to try the tomato plants again – but this time build some kind of support system with sticks and string – to keep them upright and better organized.

Area #2 – our loft. In some ways our loft is a dumping ground for the past. We have an old desk with an ancient unusable computer under it, piles of photo albums, racks and shelves of cd’s and books, old toys and dvd’s, and our collection of video cameras from another time. I decided to start tackling the past – and clean this area up. One thing I wanted to do was move our wifi router to the other side of room, so it was more centered in our house. This would hopefully gives us better wifi coverage. To do this, though, I would need to move our printer to the other side of the room too, since the printer needs to connect to the router in order for us to print wirelessly. This would mean moving a big rack of cd’s – which got me thinking – do we really need to have numerous big racks of cd’s sitting around taking up space? We don’t actually listen to any of these cd’s. We don’t even actually have a cd player in our house. Everything we listen to has either already been uploaded to iTunes or we just stream it from Apple Music. So, we decided to box up our cd’s. This is a decent size mental change for us – for me – because these cd’s used to mean so much to me. I treasured them. I spent so much time and money acquiring them and getting to know them. A large number of them predate my wife. There are also a lot of mix cd’s I made over the years – with cute little titles and pictures drawn on them. A lot of thought and time was put into making these and they were listened to countless times. Now they just sit in piles on the floor. Well – time for some change – so I moved the router, moved the printer, boxed up a bunch of cd’s, cleared out the old computer, and started making a give away bag for charity. I threw away a lot of stuff – old computer programs, memorabilia, and dvd’s we will never watch again. We started talking about how we could move some more stuff around in the room and maybe use the room a little differently. I’m not finished yet, because I only had one box and need a couple more – but the winds of change have blown in.

More change is happening too. My daughter is finishing up her 1st year of Bay Youth Orchestra next week and has an awards ceremony tonight. She will be finishing up Middle School next month and starting High School in the fall. This may be her last season of volleyball – she is saying she doesn’t want to play next season and we may finally give in. We are finishing up our first year without a dog after 15 years of having one. My work is a sea of change right now and I don’t know how much longer I will stay there. I keep thinking about trying something new and maybe I’ll make that jump later in the year. There are other things too – that I’ve talked about before – that are coming to a head soon that potentially could bring a decent amount of unwelcome change. But for now, I can only control what I can control – so I need to get some more boxes…