Finally Unpacked

I am not always OCD or organized, but when the spirit moves me, I can be rather intense about alphabetizing, labeling or color coordinating.  Sometimes I feel like I will go crazy if I have to look at a disorganized drawer, closet or room and not fix it.  It is better to just go with the flow when those urges hit or things can get ugly.

This week I have been in "one of those moods" requiring me to do some serious deep cleaning.  I have been looking at my studio and being troubled over some of the neglected containers and other spots for some time, and Tuesday I started in by moving the shelves out of my closet into the room and clearing off the work table.

When I sent the antique cupboard over to Michael's house, I had to find new homes for all my Etsy Shop inventory.  Now it is on the shelves and easy to access.

Wednesday I took it a step further and started going through plastic totes and reorganizing the contents into more usable configurations.  I filled up one whole kitchen sized garbage bag with discards.

Thursday I got serious.

The top shelf of the closet held several boxes of negatives and slides and CD's with photos stored on them. Two of the boxes had been taped up since we moved to Miller Manor almost 18 years ago!  It was beyond time to take care of those!  I got my little light table out  to view the slides and threw away hundreds, maybe even thousands of 20-30 year old slides, and some old negatives from the 80's that were taken with Ornery's medium format Mamiya camera.

In the midst of all that, I somehow got sidetracked with my box of beads, and had to spend two hours sorting and color-ordering those in some different containers.  Oh, the end result is lovely, and makes me itch to do something with the little jewels, but it will have to wait for a while, there are too many other projects waiting ahead of them in the queue. At least now when I open the lid to the box they are stored in, I sigh with satisfaction over their orderliness.  Elizabeth just rolled her eyes at me when I showed her...

Today I ordered a little contraption from Amazon that will transfer all those slides and negatives to digital media! So, I won't actually throw away the bag that contains all those slides just yet, in hopes that maybe I can salvage a few of them at least.  At any rate, all the photos we had of Elizabeth as a baby have been retrieved, and I will be working at creating a real baby book for her with those images once they are digitized.

No matter how quickly the images can be saved, the sorting and labeling of them will take me weeks, and then there is the job of putting the album all together.  It seems like a huge project--which is why it has taken me 18 years to begin on it!  (well, that and the fact that that little digital media machine is about 1/10th the cost today!)

Ornery is off this afternoon and we are going to do some long overdue grocery shopping and a few other errands.  One of these days I may actually get into the studio to do some art!