Well-Ordered Chaos » chores

My Organizing Journey, Step 2: It’s Better Than You Think

Addy — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:35:16 +0000

Last week I started writing up my organizing journey from it’s very beginnings in the fall of 2004. Since the continuation of my entryway project now rests on things beyond my control (like somebody buying my bike and my clothes), I’ve decided to spend a few posts continuing that story. Today’s post isn’t about taking physical action. You can do it all in your head while sitting on the couch. It’s nonetheless a crucially important part of my process and I never would have gotten off the ground without it.

When I left off, I had read Julie Morgenstern’s book “Organizing From the Inside Out”. In spite of my initial skepticism, I finished her book having learned something very, very important: I wasn’t as disorganized as I thought. In contrast to every other book and article I’d ever read, Morgenstern’s “Inside Out” philosophy begins with what’s already working.

It took awhile for that to sink in. What’s already working? In my life? In my home? Please. Try “nothing”.

But, having read that question, I could not unread it. The thought stayed with me, and after a while, I realized that I did not, in fact “always lose everything”. For instance, I rarely misplaced my keys and never misplaced my wallet because they always got put back in the same place.

I also realized that in spite of being extremely cluttered, I could usually, eventually, find what I was looking for. Yes, it’s true, everything I owned was stacked up in piles all over my house. Why? Was it because I’m a horrible, careless, hopelessly disorganized person like my fourth grade teacher said I was? No. My stuff was out in the open because that’s where I could see it. Like a lot of others with ADD, I’m an “out of sight, out of mind” type of person.

Did I spend more time than I liked looking for my stuff? Yes. Was my clutter driving me up a wall? Absolutely. Was the chronically disorganized state of my house exacerbating my asthma and allergy problems? Definitely. But it wasn’t as bad as it looked. Thank the gods for that, because it looked terrible; but it looked terrible because it was actually borderline functional.

Suddenly, this transformed my problem from “I’ve always been a horrible disorganized mess and I can never change” to “I’m a visual person who needs to declutter, and then implement solutions that allow me to contain my stuff where I can see it”. Compare those two thoughts. Which task sounds more manageable? Which person would you rather be?

I slowly put down my book and went to my computer. I e-mailed Jana: “I don’t want to get your hopes up … and I especially don’t want to get MY hopes up … but I think, just maybe, I can do this.”

ADD-friendly gardening tips

Addy — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 04:31:08 +0000

Or, Why I $%#@ing HATE Palm Trees

Today I realized that palm-trees are not ADD-friendly.

I came to this realization in a round about way because of the mice. As I mentioned last week, my house has been invaded by rodents. The good news is that they’re not roof rats like I thought; they’re house mice, which are certainly a problem to have living in the walls, but they’re not significant disease vectors either. I had no idea mice could be so darn LOUD.

To make a long story short, in order to trap the mice, I need to clean up my yard. Yard work isn’t so bad once I actually start doing it, but it’s one of those tasks where I have trouble getting started. My yard is ringed by mature trees, many of them tropical species. It’s very shady so I can’t plant my own stuff, which means I’m not motivated to take care of plants I planted. I’ve got several trees, most of which I wouldn’t have chosen, and none of which will be overcome by weeds. I think the last time I cleaned up my yard was … 2005? Seriously.

Which gets me to the palm trees. Weeding my yard wasn’t even the bad part. It didn’t take me much time to finish the first third of my yard, and I could easily see what I’d accomplished:

This part of the yard had weeds that came up over my knees. I cleared it in an hour.

So today, I went out to finish the other half. The important half. The half that the pest control people will need to access in order to set their traps tomorrow. After three and a half hours of work, it looked like this:

The whole yard used to look like that super-green area toward the back. In front is a very leggy butterfly bush.

Yeah, that’s right. Clearing the same amount of space took three times as long. Why? Because of those #@$^&%@ palm trees!

In truth, it’s not just the palms, it’s all the tropical plants in my yard. There are four different types of palms (some of them much skinnier than others), a few banana trees (that don’t produce fruit because it’s too cold, but there are some very weird-looking flowers on them), and a calistemon or “bottlebrush” (a tree native to Hawai’i, with a weeping growth habit). In order to get to the weeds, I had to prune the calistemon severely, and then hack my way through wilting palm fronds and banana branches. Then I had to clear the fallen fronds from the ground. Then, and only then, could I actually start weeding. On Friday, I spent an hour filling our two 32 gallon compost bins and two 33 gallon compostable yard waste bags — that’s 130 gallons, for those of you keeping score at home. Today, before I could even start pulling weeds, I filled both compost bins and three yard waste bags. That’s right. 163 gallons of palm tree detritus, before I could even start weeding.

The bin in back is 32 gallons, the compostable yard waste bag in front is 33 gallons

These are the banana branches I had to hack through in order to get at the ground to weed.

A large pile of banana leaves. My tiny lens does not do it justice.

It got me thinking about how much I hate tropical plants. They’re all well and good when they’re in the jungle. Jungles, by definition, are overgrown. My northern California yard should not be. Furthermore, tropical plants grow all year round, which means they drop leaves and fronds all year round. Many of them are too big to just rake up, which means you have to collect them by hand. For someone with ADD, this presents one of those barriers to action which keep us from getting started on the task at hand.

Older branches (the grey ones) slowly collapse until they're in the way of foot traffic. The stalks of these fronds are very hard, sharp, and serrated. This is not good.

So my advice to you, if you have ADD and are planning a landscaping project, is to avoid the tropicals. Pick trees that drop their leaves once a year, so you only have to rake once a year, or plant conifers. Pick plants that have open, upright growth habits. If you like trees with a weeping habit, like willows or some varieties of flowering cherry, be sure and plant them far enough away from other trees that they don’t become tangled and forbidding. Check a gardening book for trees to plant near swimming pools, as these trees are selected because they’re less messy. Double check with your local plant nursery or garden center.

Having ADD doesn’t mean you can’t have a beautiful outdoor space. Just be sure and find plants that are low-maintenance and ADD-friendly.

Today I Cleaned My Kitchen

Addy — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 22:48:20 +0000

Well, part of it anyway. But I cleaned that part of it really well.

I’ve been bitching a lot this week about feeling all tired and hibernatey. Low energy, low motivation, blah blah blah. Today I had to get it together because my partner’s coming back from a business trip, and I know from experience that it sucks to come home to this:

The bottle of cleanser is a nice touch, don't you think?

Oh, it’s even worse than it looks. In that pile of crap on the counter are peaches that I separated from the rest of the peaches a few days ago because they were starting to go moldy. I set them on the counter, telling myself I’d take them out to the compost bin later that day. Hah.

A memento mori. For fruit.

There were also some lovely, delicious, and flavorful dry-farmed tomatoes from last week’s farmers’ market. Well, they would have been lovely and delicious, except I forgot about them:

More fruit, casting off their mortal coils.

I really, REALLY wish I didn’t do things like that.

Anyway, I got the dishes into the dishwasher, cleaned the counters, and started on the stove. It was nice and sunny in my kitchen, which is perhaps why I wound up hyperfocusing on the stove top. The stove was new a few years ago. Within a week I had put my stove-top espresso pot on to do its thing, walked away from it, forgotten all about it, and come back to find a cup of espresso baked on to the stove top. I wiped it up at the time, but it seemed baked on for good; and there it remained for years.

It now looks like this:

Shiny, sparkling, and stain-free. Thanks, Big Pharma!

Oh yeah.