Looking back...

If you pay attention to my facebook page at all, you might have noticed that I've been working on cleaning up my computer - I've been going through the past 5+ years of photos, deleting the crappy ones, and transferring the good ones over to flash drives. It's been a long process, and I'm nowhere near done yet. But I'm getting there.

Before I started...

Where I am now...

But of course, in order to do this, I have to go through every single folder of pictures and look at every single one. Luckily they're already pretty much grouped in order by what day I uploaded them from the camera, so I have just been going through them one day at a time.

I've been trying not to dwell on the content of the pictures so much. I'm a very sentimental person, and I can look at old pictures all day long - so I know that I have to really focus on the end goal here or it's going to take me forever to get this done. So far, I've gotten 2008 and 2009 off of my computer (except for a huge rogue folder of 2008 that I just found this morning, but I haven't touched that one yet).

Those were 2 very interesting years in my life. (If you're not familiar with the story, this post will explain a lot of it, and there are links in there that can lead you to other stories. Or you can just ask me. Seriously.)

In 2008 we were living in my old house and I was still married to my second husband. So there are a lot of pictures of him. I wouldn't say that I get sad looking at them - but I have caught myself saying "I wonder what would have happened if....." several times.

In 2009, I kicked him out. And my life fell apart in so many ways, but I didn't admit that for a long time. I don't think that even my closest friends realized how bad it was for me.

But you know what? Looking at those pictures from that time frame - wow, was it ever obvious.

This house - this little ghetto-esque house that we live in now - it gets messy. It gets dirty. It's not always clean and neat and organized. But for the most part, it's decent. We got rid of a lot of stuff when we moved (moving into a house that's less than half the size of your old one will force your hand in that department) and I do my best to keep it organized.

The pictures of the old house? Holy wow, how did we ever live like that? Seriously, it was filthy, and it was so obvious in those pictures. I mean it - I let it get dirty. And that's how it would stay.

Every now and then I'd go on a massive cleaning/organizing binge, and it would look good. For a day or two. And then I would just let everything slide again.

It's funny. I don't always think that I've come that far...but then I start looking back - really looking back - and I see the progress that I've made. I'm still not perfect. The house can still be a disaster at times, but the main difference now is that it might only be 2 or 3 days' worth of disaster, instead of months' worth of disaster. Seeing the actual photographic evidence of the change was truly eye opening for me and has really gotten my brain going back into overdrive again (oh yay).

I think I gave myself a virtual kick in the butt. If I could come this far already...... hmmmm...... might be time to go back to the notebook and write down some more plans.

Another day in the life...

We didn't do anything terribly exciting today. It was nice being able to sleep in for a change, since this was the first "official" day of Spring Break for the kids. They actually let me sleep in much later than I expected, but then demanded that I get up to make them breakfast. But I fed them yesterday....

Sarah was still gone visiting a friend, so the 4 kids and I hung out and I cleaned and puttered around the house. They spent most of the day bickering over what movies to watch and what games to play, since it was raining almost all day. I could have sent them outside to play in the mud, but that would just create more of a mess for me to clean up so yeah, that wasn't happening. I do enough laundry and sweeping and mopping as it is.

After Sarah got home, we decided to get out of the house for a bit. We ended up going to Burger King for supper so that the kids could blow off some steam in the playground for a while and I could just sit and think somewhat coherently and make a to-do list.

It wasn't really storming out at all today, although there were a few rumbles of thunder and I saw a few flashes of lightning. It just pretty much rained all day, but it had stopped by the time we went out to eat. When we left the restaurant though, the sky looked super cool.

After we got home and I was trying to put laundry away, I got irritated because I can never find enough hangars for my clothes. I thought about going out to buy more, and then really started to look at my clothes. I don't have a closet - my stuff hangs on a rack (that I found in the yard when we moved in to this house) in the laundry room. And it was crammed full.

So I started looking through clothes and realized that I didn't really need any more hangars - I needed to get rid of some crap. I started going through and pulled out a bunch of stuff that I haven't worn in years, and some stuff that had been given to me that I never wore, and some stuff that was just downright hideous. It didn't make a huge difference, but I probably have about 15 empty hangars that I didn't have before, and 2 bags of stuff to be donated somewhere.

And it's all organized. For now.

Oh, and an added bonus? I found a couple of pairs of jeans that fit me that I didn't know that I had!

I'm actually hoping to go through it again and get rid of a few more things - it usually takes me 2 or 3 runs through the stuff to really thin it out - but it's going to be done. I have way too much crap in this house and a lot of it just needs to go elsewhere so that the next time we move, I don't have to deal with so much extra useless stuff.

Little by little, we're getting there. One of these days I'm going to go through that shelf that's over top of the clothes and get rid of 90% of the games and toys that are stashed up there. The kids have never really played with them, so they just need to go too.

Hopefully the weather will be a little nicer tomorrow and we can get back outside again. But, it doesn't look terribly promising. We'll just have to see what happens.