Weekend Report

hope_evey, do you read hip_domestics? There was a post there just now that made me think of you 🙂

I FINISHED THE FILING! 

You can’t real­ly under­stand what a major achieve­ment that is until you under­stand that we had years of papers, dat­ing back to before Sam and I knew each oth­er, that had nev­er been prop­er­ly filed. Seriously—we both had box­es of papers. We start­ed going through them a year or two ago, and have thrown away more and more until we reached the cur­rent point. All of the files now live in fold­ers, neat­ly orga­nized so that I can find what’s in them at need. There are no piles of paper any­where. None. The fold­ers aren’t labeled as nice­ly as I’d like, and I don’t promise that any­body but me can find stuff, but all the papers are filed.

I have one half-full box of receipts that I need to put in Quick­en so that I can throw most of them away and file any that might be need­ed in the future. That should­n’t take long, though I’ll have to do it in small batch­es to be nice to my body.

We still haven’t found some of my pre­scrip­tions and one impor­tant insur­ance doc­u­ment. I know they’re all here, but they’re hid­ing ter­ri­bly well. I took care of lots of cor­re­spon­dence so that the stuff in the “to-do” piles could be filed prop­er­ly. I also did the twice-year­ly round of request­ing cred­it reports for both of us from all three of the big cred­it bureaus, just to keep an eye on things. I think I’ll put that on my cal­en­dar, in fact, so that I just get a reminder every six months.

Sam helped me do a bit of rear­rang­ing in the office so that I could put the file carts into the clos­et. I need to put away some sup­plies, but that won’t take long. We also improved the retreat nest in the bed­room. Sam’s been using it more than me late­ly, as he’s dis­cov­ered how very com­fort­able the reclin­er is when he needs a qui­et space to write.

Now I’m begin­ning the process of rebuild­ing the OS on my PC. I’ve got most things backed up to the serv­er, but I can’t fig­ure out where Web­shots stores its data files. I like my pret­ty pic­tures. I know they’re encrypt­ed some­how in an attempt to keep peo­ple from using them any­where but in the appli­ca­tion, but I can’t find any like­ly can­di­dates. I can’t imag­ine that they actu­al­ly add them to the pro­gram file itself, do they? That would get HUGE, no mat­ter how good their image com­pres­sion might be.

Sam rebuilt the guest room com­put­er to use Lin­ux so that it’s more sta­ble. It’s talk­ing to its CD burn­er and every­thing! Isn’t that neat? We just need to set it up in there now, and guests will be able to get on the web for email easily.

He’s work­ing on build­ing a new machine for a friend, then we need to put togeth­er his sand­box machine. Then all those old parts can go away to a new home, clear­ing out lots of space in the guest room. I love decluttering!

Before peo­ple arrive for my birth­day, I still want to:

Bathe Shel­ley again
Clean both bathrooms
Get Sam to put the door back on the hall bath linen closet
Hang the last of the full-length mir­rors (two are up, the third should be)
Clean out the fridge/freezer
Clean the carpets
Get the guest room ready for actu­al guests
Fin­ish clean­ing Katie’s room (she needs to do that, but it’s impor­tant to me that it get done)
Dust everything
Vac­u­um the liv­ing room furniture
Put away all the tools
Put the CDs in order (so we can find the music we want to play)
Put the non-fic­tion books in order (we’re always want­i­ng to show a par­tic­u­lar book to guests and can’t find it)
Fix the hope chest lid
Put legs on the jew­el­ry chest

After all this stuff is done, I need to go about get­ting my crafts stuff bet­ter orga­nized, too.