Getting Back To Normal ... Is There Such A Thing?

My head is filled with snippets of thoughts and ideas. There is a tornado blasting through my brain. A piece of one idea is flung from the vortex to whiz past some thought process. It travels so fast I only get a fleeting glimpse of the idea before another one gets ejected. There are so many of these little pieces of thought with no substance to capture and set down as a goal that I am at a total stand still as to what to do. This can be so disheartening and cause me to feel so overwhelmed that anything I set out to do is blocked by more of these whiz bang shooting pieces of ideas.

In truth, this has been coming for quite a while. The theft from our vehicle in Colorado and the subsequent itemizing of the loss was the launching point of the tornado like mess in my head. Getting one thing accomplished fully is such a daunting task that nothing gets done. That is why I am a member of http://www.flylady.net . Her mantra of "You can do anything for 15 minutes" is something I try to live by. Notice I said "try". There are times that 15 minutes seem to run on forever.

I did spend all day yesterday pawing through years of receipts to find the necessary slip of paper that indicates where the item had been originally purchased, the price of the item, and the date of the purchase. Looking for Serial Numbers was the most frustrating part of the whole event.

It took a total of five emails to the police officer in Colorado to get it all sent. Too much information (TMI) with the scanned receipts and lists to go in just one email.

One of the ideas I did capture out of the whirling dervish in my brain was to find some kind of form to write Serial Numbers and equipment items on. Google, good old Google. The New Zealand Insurance Commission has come up with a form they have entitled SNAP - Serial Number Action Project. http://www.ns.org.nz/20.html at the bottom of the page is an Adobe PDF file. Get it and save yourself mounds of trouble. Sure beats the heck out of creating one myself. That process would never get done because I would have a major fight going on in my brain about where to begin.

Today is, pretty much, the last day I have to get a lot of things done (hence the tornado). Laundry, some housework - like vacuuming and decluttering. Flylady calls it "Hot Spot Fire Drills".

This is my "Hot Spot" in the living room. When we dash home for a night, or a couple days, and I have to go through the shower bag or some of our bins to declutter the stuff we take along with us - this is where it gets dumped until a later date. I see this monster and I say it has to wait until I get more than just one day off.

Let me tell you, if our kids came to our home now, today, and saw the mess I would get a whole lot of sass about "Picking up after myself" like I used to give them when they were younger. I do have to say that I am proud of our kids. They are doing an excellent job of keeping their homes in order.

Let me see, I probably could pitch about 90 percent of that stuff right in the trash. There is a treasure on that table that has to go in my scrapbooking room. The wooden box. My daughter and her husband made about 30 of these boxes for one of their friends wedding showers. My daughter did a Hawaiian theme and the boxes were filled with flip flops, sunscreen, a scented candle, and something else I don't remember. That box is a keeper. Need to take care of it.

There are boxes of kleenex from the hotels we stay in. Joe thinks he needs a box in his "truck bag" to take with him. The "truck bag" is a tote that holds all the little stuff we need to transfer from our vehicle to the trucks we drive. Phone chargers, suction cup pinch clips to hold the placards and Drive Away license plates in the windows, audio books we are listening too and a spare, extension cords for the cigarette plugs, and miscellaneous other things we need only in the truck. This includes a box of kleenex.

So the kleenex boxes I can put away in a bathroom cabinet. The little bottles of shampoo I bought long ago and don't like them. I'll use them for toilet cleaning - Flylady says "soap is soap" in her Swish & Swipe section for bathroom cleaning. A paperback book can go on the shelf behind the table. And junk the rest. What's in the paperbag you might ask? Answer, haven't a clue, I'll have to go take a look.

You know, I could have had this all done by now instead of taking up all this time to write this out. Procrastination is what this is called. So, I guess I had better get things done. I've got laundry to do, that table to clean off, bathrooms to Swish & Swipe, a kitchen floor that needs to be swept and mopped, and carpet that needs to be vacuumed. I'll go and set my timer for 15 minutes and start with the laundry part and kitchen floor.