It's been a while.....

Several weeks, in fact.

The day after I wrote my last post, a person to whom I am very close encountered some serious difficulties. All I wanted to do was to help this person.

And all I wanted to write about was this person and those difficulties. And that would have overstepped the bounds of confidentiallity in about 18 different ways.

So I wrote nothing.

But things swung 'round to ok and I was beginning to think about how to get back into my plans to re-invent myself and, frankly, even wondering if I still wanted to write about it.

And then: I fell and broke a bone or two and -- maybe -- suffered a concussion. Neither my brain nor my body were up to much.

Six weeks later, I am beginning to feel reasonably well. I have started walking again, a bit gingerly and a bit slowly. I have been working with the new routines I had been trying to set up around housework, and the house does look a bit better. I haven't done anything about my clothes and I guess I won't now until after the holidays.

I did challenge myself to do something new. Nothing terribly difficult or exciting, but I do want to write about it soon.

So why did I decide to start writing this blog again? A follower -- to be honest, I think she is my only follower -- wrote to ask how I was doing.

To that lone follower, I just want to say that your kind words have spurred me on again. Thank you.

Too many clothes, too little to wear

Re-inventing myself as I approach my 70's also means re-inventing my wardrobe.

Like so many, I have way too many clothes and too little to wear. Blogs about how to whittle down and edit a wardrobe so that it suits you are all over the web, but so many of them are aimed at younger women.

What I need to do now . . . and have been doing over the last several months . . . is just get rid of enough stuff so that I can see what I have.

I know it is a lot. Despite sending at least a dozen giant bags of discarded clothing to the local charities which sell or  recycle used clothes and perhaps another four or so bags straight to the trash, I still have clothing jammed into my armoire, shoved into boxes and old suitcases under the bed, in cartons in the attic and in TWO dressers in the bedroom.

It is just about time to exchange the Summer clothing in the armoire and dressers for the Winter clothing under the bed and in the attic. I am going to make one simple commitment to myself: to have at least one more giant bag off to the recyclers by the time I finish the exchange.

I know where I am going to start, too. For about three weeks in the Spring and another three in the Fall, the most comfortable way of dressing for the temperatures is a light t-shirt, or if it is a little cooler a turtleneck, under a button-down shirt. With decent jeans or good slacks and a simple accessory, this looks adequately put-together for my stay-at-home life and gets me in and out of the grocery store without embarrassment.

The problem? Jammed into my armoire are enough button-down shirts that I could wear a different one every day for a month and still have some left over. In fact, there are probably almost enough that I could wear a different one on each of those Spring and Fall days for the rest of my foreseeable life.

Time to haul them all out and pick a reasonable handful of the favourites.

The Emergency Room

I didn't blog yesterday.

I spent the day in the emergency room with someone who was having sudden vision problems. It turned out it was a reaction to a medication and all should be well, but I was scared.

Scared, because I was worried for the other person. But also scared because I was reminded of how I once went totally blind in one eye and partially in the other. Surgery worked, and my vision was nearly restored. (The loss is mainly in the peripheral area.)

But I do worry that I will someday be blind. Could I ever learn to be happy without written words in my life? For me, that would be the worst, even knowing there was a way to substitute text-based words with audio-based ones.

I saw others who were scared, too. An older woman having an extreme allergic reaction. A very old man whose wife had had a heart attack. A family whose father had had a stroke. A young woman who looked as if she had been beaten. A very young woman whose baby was about to arrive too early.

I wonder how many would remember it was Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving Reflections

Today, I miss my sister and brothers, my cousins, their kids and grandkids. My small household is here in Canada, the rest of my family scattered over the US and Japan.

I miss others, too, because at 69 there will be many who have died: my father long ago, my mother only a few years ago, my mother-in-law, most of my uncles and aunts, even a few cousins.

And today is a family day. We are celebrating Thanksgiving (actually, a day early, but that happens). It will be a sad day with just the three of us, but it will also be a good day.

Because today, I am also thankful:

• For good health
• For my family
• For living in the province, the city, the neighbourhood, the house I love
• For having, despite some serious problems along the way, a good life
• And for being able to share some of that goodness with others.

I am also thankful that those pesky little onions are peeled, the stuffing is almost finished and the brussel sprouts from the CGA are cut and cleaned.

Thankful, too, that I now know to how to cook those brussel sprouts so they won't taste like miniature waterlogged cabbages. Thanks, little sister, for showing me how to roast them!

A Blog of Her Own

I hadn't intended this blog to be so much about blogging.

But I have needed to spend a lot of time just figuring out the mechanics of blogging.

Yes, I jumped in at the deep end, starting my first blog and the Nester's 31-day writing challenge on the very same day.

It's been good fun and I have learnt a lot, but I haven't been able to spend as much time on my re-invention, let alone write about it. And that was the intention.

From now on, I will only write about the mechanics of blogging on Saturdays, when I will write about what I did to the blog in the past week, trying to provide useful links on how I managed each step.

The big change for today is that I added an "about me" page -- very basic, like everything on this blog. It's over there in the top-right. Doing that, this blog was very helpful. It is a bit outdated as it refers to the old dashboard, but it gave me the information I needed to understand these directions for the new dashboard.

Deadlines! Deadlines!

My desk notebook is up and running and so far proving helpful. I'm sure how it goes together will change over time, but yesterday I started five pages, one for each of the organizations for which I volunteer, one for personal, and one for blog and journal.

Then, for each page, I wrote down all the deadlines and meetings with their dates. I thought of the page as roughly representing the rest of the month and spaced the items out accordingly. In other words, a project due towards the middle of the time period was written about halfway down the page and one due at the end of the month was written towards the bottom. The spaces in between were used to list the things I needed to do in preparation for a particular project or meeting.

Next, of course, I worked backward. The draft for the presentation I will be making on the 28th has to be submitted for final approval two weeks before, so that is the 14th. And it needs to be circulated by the 11th (that's tomorrow!) for pre-approval at a meeting on the 13th.

Yes, see how tight this all is! I am probably not going to making these deadlines and am going to have to negotiate more time. But at least I know that I am going to have to do that now, which I wouldn't have if I was sticking to my old, no longer working, seat-of-my-pants ways.

It seems strange that I need to be learning this now, but the old ways used to work. And  right now, the new ways are difficult. Working backwards was hard, even though I guess, in some ways, I had always been doing it. Otherwise, I could never have functioned as well as I did.

But getting it down on paper was new. And I realized how useful it was once I had finished all the pages, and highlighted the various deadlines and meetings. It is easy now to look at all of them together and see the scheduling I will need if I am to get everything done in time.

It was also easy to see that I needed to stop my planning and quickly finish off a report due this morning. That was close!

Planning to Plan

I spent a lot of time yesterday looking at blogs about planning. Most of them involved making pretty plans in pretty planners. All were lovely to look at; none of them really worked for me.

But then I found this article on the Unclutterer (a fun and useful site about dealing with both physical and mental clutter). The idea that appealed to me was having two simple notebooks, one holding the to-do lists for my upstairs "office" where I do most of my writing, and one for my downstairs "nest" which seems to be homebase for much of my domestic planning.

Those notebooks can themselves be subdivided. The obvious way to do this in my office is a page or section for each of the organizations for which I do volunteer work plus one for personal stuff. I can do that now, although I suspect the exact divisions will evolve as I go along.

I am less clear about how to subdivide the domestic notebook. By how often tasks need to get done? By room? By general type (Errands, Cleaning, Decluttering, etc.)?

The Unclutterer article also led me to this which provides a very simple method of marking the status of items on the to-do lists. I think that should work pretty well, once I get the hang of it.

Still needed is someway of deciding priorities and setting deadlines. I have some ideas on that, but I need to think about it a bit more.

I'd love to hear your ideas! Please leave a comment!