A year, already?

Actually, a year and a day or two... that's when I first started this blog. Just think, it was only a year ago that I was a 3o-year-old unemployed loser living at home and whining about my life to the internet in general. Now look at me - I'm a 31-year-old employed loser living at home and whining about my life to the internet in general. What a difference a year makes...

I thought it was worth a post of commemoration, if nothing else.

Last week, I was trying to get my life in order. This week, I've taken it literally and started organizing "my" parts of the house. With four adults in one household, certain areas end up under certain people's jurisdictions, and while my own personal territory is rather small (a corner of the living room, a workbench in the basement, some storage space in the shed, and my bedroom), it still tends to accumulate junk at an alarming rate when I'm not paying attention. There are places I can't go near until I have sufficient storage space cleared (which can't happen until the yard dries out and I can get to the storage sheds), but I've made visible progress. I've heard from a number of sources that you cannot receive anything unless you have an open place in your life, and that clutter on a physical, mental, and spiritual level is a sure-fire way to ensure that you won't get anything or anywhere. Regardless of whether that's true, I just plain feel better when my surroundings are relatively tidy. I say "relatively" because I'll never have a Martha Stewart sense of tidyness. Actually, having things too sterile and pristine makes me a bit nervous, like being in a showroom house where you're certain you're devaluing the property simply by crossing the threshold. My definition of organization is having books on shelves, papers in folders, and a good idea of what's in a box or drawer before I open it. Of course, thirtyish years of packratism enforced by being raised in a nest of packrats isn't exactly the easiest thing to get over, nor is it easy to clean up my space when others stubbornly continue to hoard clutter (clutter which seems to keep encroaching on my space despite my best efforts to counter the creep), but I'm working on it.

Like most things I do, my cleanup kick has a bit of an ulterior motive. I need to get my tax stuff together, for one thing, and I also need to go through my computer stuff to get all my Really Important Stuff in order. April is the month I have pegged for the new computer, and it'll go that much easier if I have a space cleared out and all my disks for programs and accessories ready to go. I have, by the way, decided to go through the shop that my sister bought through. They fixed her problem by installing a new motherboard, which will allow her to upgrade to 4 GB of RAM if/when she upgrades to Vista (XP only recognizes 3 GB of RAM, and Vista's a memory hog.) I'd like the option to upgrade without creating random crashouts, so I'll be requesting the same motherboard that she wound up with. It's a bit more expensive, but it's worth it to have a stable computer. They also assemble computers pretty fast, and the sooner I can get everything up and running again, the sooner I can install my new toys, and the sooner I can get serious about upgrading the Skyhaven Hunt.

I suppose I ought to trudge off. Monday's only a few minutes away, and I have a lot more clutter clearing to do tomorrow.