Don is safely in New Orleans after flying down in a posh private plane, with food and snacks and a chance to sit in the cockpit and places to put his feet up and lots of talk and laughter with some of his castmates and the director and choreographer. It’s a tough life.
Today they start teching the show but not before he gets out for that beignet and some coffee.
I ended up feeling rather ambitious yesterday, so I listened to some of my favorite music and cleaned up the office. I had done nothing to organize the desk for a few months, resulting in stacks of paperwork, stuff I brought back from Hartford, mail, etc. The same, if not worse, was the case with Don’s desk. This is what happens in our house when we spend a chunk of time away from home.
Much better! And very satisfying, I must say.
No, I never got around to painting all the furniture for Little Z’s dollhouse. Bad Aunt. And now I think he’s getting too big for it. It has been transformed into a shelf unit for printer paper, etc.; not on purpose, it’s just handy that way.
Very satisfying, indeed! Now, on to Don’s desk, where there were piles of things from his time in California, CDs, mail, photos, and a giant sombrero that he found in an antique store in Walnut, IA. I knew he wanted to hang the sombrero on the wall and I was sick of seeing it on top of everything on his desk, so…
There it is. Don loves Mexican culture. I must say, it’s really beautiful. And it’s vintage. I texted him a photo of the ‘done deed.’ Thumbs up.
Believe me, this is much better than it was! There’s actually some space on the top of the desk.
The rest is up to him, but since he’ll only be home for about a month or so at the end of the year, I don’t think it’s at the top of his To Do list.
I usually keep my laptop on the desk but, since I got back from Hartford, it’s been downstairs in the den next to my blogging chair. So I hadn’t really spent too much time up in the office, but that will change when I figure out what I’m going for with the new modern dollhouse.
It’s a ‘surprise’ holiday to yours truly. I do not like there being no mail delivery. No, I don’t.
Harrumph!
Happy Thanksgiving to my Canadian readers!
Happy Monday.
Doesn’t a tidy and organized space just put a smile on your face? Oh my, that turned into a rhyme!
Do you remember what pattern you used for your desk chair cover? I like how it ties in the back.
Poor Don!! How ever did he manage such a hard flight to New Orleans? 😊
Seriously, he is going to have such fun with this show! I realize you two have so much time apart, but the adventures you both have and the people you meet with your work are just amazing!
Hope you have a wonderful day!
No pattern! It’s from IKEA and it came that way!
Don must be exhausted from his arduous journey…life is rough lol! Enjoy your day! ;)
Yeah, I feel so sorry for him!
Good for Don! A bit of luxury now and then, is good for him! Hope his beignets are delicious—I’m a bit jealous.
Love that little yellow wire bin and its advert/graphics. Nice work space, but it makes me want to get mine in order, too, but for now I’m staying upstairs in the AC!
Don says it’s incredibly humid down in New Orleans – horrible!
Yes, it would be, with the hurricane in the neighborhood and all. But still, New Orleans, so atmospheric!
xo
It always feels good to get something organized. Now you can get to work on your modern doll house. Love the sombrero! I’m just glad Don had a good trip to New Orleans. It is raining today so another day inside for me. Feeling a bit down I think. I didn’t see the family yesterday and that always gives me a boost. I need to organize my bedroom shelves and pack up more things for either storage or the thrift shop. So a goal for today…yay!
Raining here as well. Torrential rains this morning. It’s sort of a gloomy day. Do some organizing – that helped me yesterday!
Isn’t a newly neatness work space great, Claudia? It will give you room and incentive to begin work on your modern doll house. I’ve reorg’d my workspace too and I freed up 2/3 of the lower cabinet of a wall unit where I used to keep office supplies. They are now in an IKEA tall Alex unit. The old system worked for years (supplies in labeled diaper wipe boxes..I like repurposing) but this works better for me now. I sorted and made a donation pile from all the tools and hardware in my garage. I didn’t need six hammers… Organizing all the major categories in the garage is done! Time to dole out the various donations. Feels great to declutter.
Yes, it’s really freeing to have an organized space. Clutter is okay for a while but eventually, it makes me crazy! Good for you – sounds really organized at your house!
“… he’ll only be home for about a month or so at the end of the year…” wow, what you just said really brings home just how much you and Don will be apart except for your meet-ups with him in certain cities; you can handle it, of course, but…still…it’s a lot of weeks yet to 2018…
Very nice always to clean up our spaces; is a good feeling if we can just remember that feeling and DO IT as you did.
Violent (and howling) Santa Anas blowing here since the wee hours; biggest wind so far for the season. I have trees bending so far from east to west that I fear the boughs will break. My dog is whimpering and hiding in corners so I need to go check on her; she hates the sound of these winds when they begin to mimic a freight train. If I even see one of my outside/feral cats, in the open, they hunker down flat to hug the ground or, no lie, the wind could pick them up and toss them around; one of my cats is really quite old and small (as an adult, the one time we could get her into a trap and to a vet, she only weighed 6 lbs although she was weaning at the time; she’s a lightweight in the wind, little sweet thing). I’ve got to go out in this gale in a couple of hours but thankfully only a block from home.
We have schools here with big schoolyards to where sometimes the outside spaces are even used as outdoor classrooms; you can get away with that here because we don’t have a lot of (usually) severe weather, but one high school (my alma mater) has a very spread-out campus between three streets, up and down steep hills and sometimes as teens we could barely make it from classroom to classroom between bells, lugging our books, trudging at a steady pace (and sometimes running if we were late!)…and that was on a good day. On a windy day like this, and trying to hike that campus against those gusts? And we had to wear dresses and skirts in those times, never pants/slacks. (It could be quite a show as we tried to walk and also hold down our hemlines in the wind machine that IS a Santa Ana! One arm full of those heavy textbooks, another hand trying to hold down a dress, then walking uphill against wind and trying to stay upright and not fall on your noggin! We’d arrive to class a bedraggled mess; it was uncool to put a scarf on your head or use hairspray.) Would not only be HOT but you’d feel so tired after having to buck that wind all day; I’d be glad to get home in the afternoons and just conk out with some of Mom’s good, cold lemonade. My folks’ house always stayed pretty cool, even in the pre-A/C days. We’ll be mid-90s today, or higher, We only had a one-day break from this, but the weather is just a part of our warm and windy Falls here. Very low humidity also. You of course remember this, Claudia, having lived in San Diego.
It’s weird as to what’s open today and what’s not for the holiday; yes, the p.o. is closed yet my bank is open. All the schools are closed. My husband’s on jury duty but the courts are closed today. I was reading about it and I didn’t have any real knowledge about a move, say in Berkeley here in Calif (or Minneapolis, I think Seattle[?], etc.), to change the name from Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day…like as far back as 25 years ago in progressive Berkeley (I guess you could say I’m a bit out of the loop[!] but I think it’s more of a case of not paying enough attention or maybe I once thought it was trivia so didn’t retain the info in my brain). In my county, we’re still officially calling it Columbus Day.
Don’s got SoCalif blood in him like I do so, yes, Mexican culture can’t help but be part of us. Our history (we spent time in elementary school studying the California missions [18th & 19th century coastal {self-sustaining} outposts founded by Catholic priests as Spain expanded their empire here; 21 missions in total from San Diego to San Francisco, connected by one route called El Camino Real; a fascinating although controversial history]); also the language is a second skin (lilting and colorful Spanish names of rivers, canyons, mountains, lakes, cities, streets, buildings); I love the food, music, festivals, pottery as Don does his sombreros. I don’t think anyone here would much argue that SoCalif is more Mexican than not…Mexican in all things as mentioned. Our citizens in my particular town are largely/predominantly born of Mexican ancestry (the majority population). If you go slightly south of the border to, say, Ensenada, and I guess it’s true of most (or a lot) of Baja (“Lower California”), even the terrain looks the same (barren, frankly; not the tropical feel as much further south like Puerto Vallarta on the ‘mainland’; the air feels the same, too (here where I live, especially at this time of year if we didn’t have irrigation and many trees planted over time, we’d be dusty and brown). We’ve certainly got Mexico’s sun and warm temps, too. It’s all a very unique ‘feel’ and I know the diff because I once lived in southeast Texas and the Mexican influence there, as near-neighbor, isn’t the same (even the food is different from SoCalif’s) but that’s really no surprise because Mexico is large and has a lot of regions/states just like the U.S. has…or Canada for that matter, and so on & so on (look how diff, for instance, Eastern Canada is from Western Canada, with Quebec being so singularly French – it’s all so interesting to me, all the diversity right here on my own continent!).
A segue, Claudia…but have you ever been interested in genetic testing? It’s another thing that’s debatable, but I’ve been wondering about that $99 DNA test you can do with ancestry.com; have seen the TV ads about it. Just wonder what kind of story it could tell although I already know quite a lot about what makes me up; like, it’s not myth, for me, that I have a Creek ancestor and another who was Cherokee (my U.S. Native American ‘blood’ has been substantiated with concrete documentation) but I’ve always had some questions, after doing some family history research many years ago; could be interesting to do one of those tests! (Has been a question on one branch of my family, going back to the early 1700s, if their origins were Dutch or German, for instance; I’d like to finally know the answer on that!)
I’ve been to Ensenada – when I first moved to San Diego. The obligatory trip to Tijuana, etc. Don has spent a fair amount of time in Mexico – at least in his youth, and I know his favorite food is Mexican.
No, interestingly, I have no interest in genetic testing. I know that I’m English, German, Scots and Irish. That’s enough for me. I can see where it would be interesting, especially if one is missing information about his/her background. I have several friends who are adopted and they truly don’t know anything about their heritage. For them, it would be illuminating. But no, I don’t think I’ll ever do it.
I don’t know if I will either…it’s expensive, isn’t it…but, oh gosh yes, I’m sure that a something/anything clue about oneself is a treasure to cling to, in the absence of nothing else if a person is adopted with absolutely no clues about background. I found out as an adult that my aunt had a child out of wedlock (1930s) and he only finally made contact with her 50 years later because there was a granddaughter who, for medical reasons, really did need to find out some information. Can you imagine going to a doctor’s office, filling out initial patient forms where they ask you about family medical history, like father/mother/sibling…and you have no choice but to leave it blank…
In terms of DNA ethnicity, one thing that is a lingering question in both my husband’s and my background is to whether or not we have a Jewish history…which was covered up, back in the day. I haven’t read too much on the subject, but I guess so many immigrants came to America with a strong need to assimilate; there seemed to be prejudice against foreigners and wariness over their customs/language/traditions; sounds like immigrants wanted to blend in with their new lives and not stick out too much. Clearly, on some fronts, it was a less-enlightened time. On my maternal side, my Dutch ancestors completely Americanized both surname and birth names, like Hans became Henry (and with a three-word surname, merged it to be one word) once in America and, unfortunately, my grandfather retained not one word of the Dutch language unless he just wasn’t say’in…
But both my husband’s last name and my maiden name look like ones which had been altered, so as possibly not to be mistaken for Jewish, which I think is SO wrong but, you know, we can’t go back to the mindsets of another century. He does have one maternal relative identified, who was a lone wolf; nobody ever knew anything about her except that she arrived alone on American soil in the earlier 1800s with a menorah in hand that is still in existence in the wider family (Midwest). But we think there’s possibly a Jewish heritage on his paternal side, too…and also on MY paternal side. And I like that; I love that both he and I are a big mix of a lot of histories. I just think it might be fun to know the whole story.
It was always my first question to my parents once I was in my teens: What are we? Are we French, Polish, Irish, Norwegian, Italian, Greek? What are our roots? Both being the youngest of their families…each of them, the baby of the family…my too-young mom & dad couldn’t remember discussions at the family dinner table between their sometimes much-older brothers and sisters with the parents/grandparents. My elderly neighbor tells me that times were different when she was growing up in the 20s & 30s of the last century; if the adults weren’t forthcoming about the family background, you just didn’t ask; you didn’t dig; you let it go.
And if the stuff’s not written down, all you have is family lore if you’ve got a question of “Who am I?”…but I’ve found that the lore is often incredibly accurate as much as it was verbally handed down from many generations.
Oh, I could get back the genealogy-search gene very easily; I have a cousin who’s spending a lot of time on it as a hobby for retirement. I guess I really am still quite interested in my family tree, even though my branch dies with childless me. For younger people today, they can so easily get info before it’s too late, like just hold up their phone while their great-grandmother reminisces; catch it all on camera and audio both. We need those oral histories while the older folks can still remember. I have a great-aunt who, 40 years ago, wrote everything down in precise longhand on paper. It is SUCH a perfect piece of family history and U.S. history, quite comprehensive, from what they farmed and how many acres; how they lived in the day-to-day, late-1800s Midwest, with subsequent movement of the family to Los Angeles at the turn of the last century …and then, how it was, growing up in a more-urbanized area…where silent movies were made(!) and where roofs had red tiles and a house might have a palm tree in the front yard. Elaborate details of how they washed and ironed clothes back on the farm, what dresses were sewn and for what purpose; what they did in a tornado; Saturday night baths and travel in the wagon to Church on Sundays; school in a one-room schoolhouse; the names and types of farm animals they kept; what fruits and vegetables they canned in summer; I can’t get enough of it.
xo
A few weeks back, in an absolute FRENZY of organizing, I touched [literally] every single paper item in this place! Every one [except obviously for the books]. Every file, every binder & my 2-drawer file cabinet was opened & peered into – every sheet examined for relevance or value of any kind. When finished, I’d estimate it took the total of a full 8-hour work day, and maybe a bit more. I had a massive pile for recycling, once I blacked out/cutout the sensitive information. Tossed manuals & instructions & warranties for items I haven’t seen in years – and in some cases don’t even remember owning! Tossed a lot of stuff that I wondered why I ever saved to begin with. Have lots of space to accumulate more now – & lots of empty manila file jackets to organize it too. LOL! A good feeling to have such a daunting project done & behind me. And it wouldn’t have been nearly as satisfying if I did it little by little each week. There’d be no sense of satisfaction. So maybe there is something to be said for Procrastination! PS – I like that sewing bag shopping tote. I want one! Peace. 🍁
#Resist
It’s actually holding my Featherweight Sewing Machine!
No kidding! Hah! Too cute. Well then, I want a Featherweight Sewing Machine… ✂️
xo
It IS hard to get on with organizing catch-all spaces, isn’t it? But once you do, you feel like you just conquered the world. You have such a cute office/craft area. I am so grateful for mine (oldest son’s former bedroom, which I claimed once he moved out of the dorm and into his first college apartment). My “desk” is my late mother-in-law’s kitchen table. I think about her every time I sit down there. Being apart from your spouse for prolonged periods is something I can also identify with. Next weekend is the last one mine will be around for until mid-December. In between, he’s home a day here, two days there, but mostly out of the country. Another reason I need to retire – so I can go with!
The only thing that makes this separation bearable for us is that I’m going to visit him in New Orleans and Chicago. I understand!
Every Autumn the purge- reorganize bug bites me. Notice I said EVERY Autumn, because through the rest of the year we begin to accumulate again and then it is Fall and time to start all over. Never ends. I always feel like the house is lighter when we finish. We just made our “list” of purging and reorganizing spots we want to hit. Rainy days at this time of year just seem to lend themselves to the project. But today is a lovely sunny day so it will have to wait. It never goes away!
I hope you have a nice Monday. Sometimes reorganization begets more reorganization! Enjoy!
I didn’t do any more purging today. I had to get out of the house, but it’s so warm and humid and it stormed most of the day. It’s like it’s still summer!
You sure did a great job cleaning the desk. I have a few jobs ,if you would like to tackle mine! i commend your ambition.
Marilyn
Thank you, Marilyn!
Is this a new binder/organizer on your Ikea desk? What happening to poor old Kensington ?
No, that’s not an organizer. I’ve never used a Kensington, I use a Filofax – won’t use anything else!
Poor, poor, poor boy- stuck on a posh plane with snacks and friends. I don’t know he can stand such ill treatment.
I think the desk looks pretty good-better than my hubby’s and he is home every night.
My father-in-law had a couple of those big sombreros. I am not sure what ever happened to them but I wish I had one of them to give to my son.
Hope you have a great week, Claudia. xo Diana
I’m sure they were for tourists – the sombreros. It’s very well made!
Wow…you are a great organizer when you get down to business Claudia!…It sounds like our favorite actor is moving up there doesn’t it? lol…it’s nice that even his plane trip was fun for him…I’m sure you can’t wait to get there now!!
As he said, “There’s a whole other world out there that we know nothing about!”
i think your office space looks great either way – both the before and the more organized.
in moving earlier this summer to a much smaller place, i lost a huge sunroom and my desk/ painting area is now in a corner of my living room. i’ve had to do a lot of downsizing and still have work to do to find a place for everything, but it’s worth it!
glad don had such a fun trip down to new orleans and that you can soon join him there!
happy tuesday.
kathy in iowa
We find a way to make it all work, don’t we? xo