How many hours?

Will it take to finish this?



Sheesh. I should be ashamed of myself. In fact, I am. Wow. This is about 6 months worth of magazines and catalogs. And probably one or two of the stacks are older magazines I think I moved over here when cleaning up the spare bedroom for when Jeff and Andrea visited in July. I am plowing through Stack #1 (shortest one, front far left). That was as high as the others at the start of this week.

Bad weather has helped keep me inside and working on it. Slow and steady progress. I need to speed it up, though!

Also, I've successfully cleaned out/up the tall storage shelves in the office. There is still a lot of stuff - binders, materials, things to look at closer, but all 6 of the drawers are empty. Or almost empty. I've thrown a few things back in them to get them out of the way, but nothing major.

Have thrown out at least 4 trash bags of stuff this week - woohoo!! Wonder how many pounds that is? They were heavy, that's all I know.

Onward.

Week of Disasters

Ok, first of all, I should be ashamed of myself. I was using an external HD more than I should have been - i.e., as a working drive and not backup storage as it should have been. It started acting wonky a few weeks ago, and did I leap up and back up all the files (all 300G+ of them?) NO. I did not.

So you know what happened next - actually, let me digress for a moment.

I decided on Sunday that I needed to shake things up a bit. Recalling back to the days when I used to clean and change my bedroom around all the time, and how cool and new everything felt, and how creative and inspired I felt after I did it. Now I know it's moving around the "chi" that causes that feeling!

Anyway, so I'm working on a few things Sunday morning, drive is working fine. I shut down my PC to start Operation Clean Office. 8 hours later I plug my PC back in, plug the HD into the USB drive, and....nothing. I can clearly hear the disk isn't powering up. Just a few faint clicks. And then my panic attack begins. Along with the worst case of self-loathing imaginable. I am smarter than this. I am more tech-savvy than this. I just plain KNOW BETTER. And yet...all is lost.

Or not. I have solicited the (very costly) services of a data recovery facility. Shipped the HD off yesterday and am tracking it via UPS like it's my own child. I am sick. And sad. And miserable. I feel like a limb has been amputated. Every digital photo I've ever taken is on that drive. Every file, every scan, every work product. See what I mean about how stupid I was?

I don't care the cost, I am just hoping, praying, pleading that this data recovery process will work. The HD has been delivered - now I wait for the prognosis from the engineer. As HD failures go, this one wasn't awful. No horrid noises (i.e. the sounds of the disks being destroyed) or anything. Mr. RedFish thinks it's mechanical failure (i.e. the read/write head) rather than sector/disk damage. PLEASEPLEASEPLEASE.

It's been a rough few weeks for odd things like this. First, our Garmin GPS unit stopped working while we were in PA for Thanksgiving. It was fine one minute, then we picked up my brother and his gf, and got back in the car, and nothing. Luckily, it was still under warranty, so we sent it back to be repaired.

Then my external HD. Oh, before that, my iPhone froze up and I had to restore it back to factory settings, which wiped out all my saved voicemails and pictures. It wasn't catastrophic like the HD collapse, but it was annoying.

I'm getting to the point where I don't want to touch anything electronic!

BUT..in what I am reading as omens of changing fortunes, good things started happening yesterday after the data recovery people got back to me so quickly (within an hour of my SOS call). The new Garmin arrived via UPS. They replaced our old one instead of repairing it. Then, I opened a program on my PC and found a cached version of one of the lost files. A major one, too. So that made me feel good...at least I have one.

So the upshot of the office rearranging is that I emptied out some drawers, gathered almost two boxfuls of stuff to get rid of, am on the way to finding more. The downside is the spare bedroom is a mess again, because I had to move stuff somewhere. I also miss my old behemoth of a desk more than I realized I would. But it's just an adjustment period, I guess. Less space is frustrating to me right now, but the point is to downsize. I shouldn't need a ton of crap on my desk to work....minimalize! (Is that even a word?).

I also found another foot-high stack of ripped magazine pages in the bottom drawer of one of my storage units. I thought it was all recipes/food, but turns out it isn't. Which is good in one way, because I can get rid of it. Bad, in another, because now I have to go through it! The fun never ends.....lucky for me, just a little work to do now and snow on the way. With my tight budget (what Christmas shopping?) and the cold weather, I have no excuse for not cranking this stuff out. If only I were writing or doing something that would make me money...

I just really want my files back from that hard drive. Then I can get back on track (with backups securely in place)

And we're off...

An end and a beginning!

Tonight, just completed all the previously mentioned piles.

I am beginning work on the stacks of magazines. WOO HOO!

Done!

Let's recap, shall we?

Done!:
2 large crates in closet
all loose pages stored in armoire (1 box, 1 overflow pile, 1 wooden crate)
almost all of 2 crates full of "unprocesed" pages from tv stand in office
1 broken and in need of help crate from office stack
original piles sitting on desk when this project started.

That's a lot since July!

I am just about done with the aforementioned unprocessed pages that were in the crates that form my office tv stand. I am not sure why I decided to do these when they were "hidden" by the cover, but I knew they were there, and by moving them out, I accomplished two things: all the loose piles are accounted for, and I created some new storage space for things off my desk. Will deal with all that later.

In looking around my space this morning - office, spare room/future office, I can see where I'm going. The decluttering is a HUGE project. I realized there is a large storage bin in the spare room full of loose pages. Not sure if they are sorted or what. But I am sticking to my rule of leaving things alone if they are contained right now. And in the other room. Now that I've reached this point, it's time to tackle the next most visible thing - the towering stacks of whole magazines.

I plan to try and process these as I go along - scanning, etc. rather than forming huge piles. Hopefully I can find a lot of it online and/or can be extremely judicious in tossing. As I am realizing, things are cyclical. Everything comes back around again. If only I could just toss the whole lot and call it a day! My OCD will not allow it though. How could I toss all that delicious treasure!

At least I ENJOY this!

Don't Know Why...

I pulled out more files to go through before finishing the current project. There is something about the chaos and disorder that I both love and hate. Love because it's fun, hate because I hate messiness and want my office to look like a Pottery Barn catalog.

It started when I decided I really wanted to move my "To Scan" pile off my desktop. It's about 6" high or so, and the cats keep knocking it over. I almost bought a few new file boxes at OfficeMax yesterday, then decided that $12 was a ridiculous price for a plastic box, and that I had plenty of them at home already.

I knew there were two plastic crates in the office closet that were full. Memory told me they were "NO Scan" crates but not having looked lately, I wasn't entirely sure. So this morning, I decided I wanted one of those crates to be a holding pen for the Scan pile instead.

Pulled it out, sure enough, a Post-it! "No Scan - Sorted 5/03" May of 2003. Wow. The bright side is I will fly through this stack because I've been brutal with keeping things that are out of date now. About damn time, eh?

Then I peek back into the depths of the back corner of the closet and alas! Another crate. I leave it at first, but then it nags at me, so I pulled that one out too. These are bigger crates, meant for filing, so the stacks measure nearly 15". I took the content of one crate and stacked it on top of the never-ending pile sitting next to my desk chair. I'm so proud of myself because I have gotten this pile down to about 14" twice now.

1. Original pile - came from armoire. Box fill, plus another pile on top. Got this down to level with top of box - roughly 1 foot high.

2. Then moved another stack from office table to top of this pile. Got that back down about 6' or so before being sidelined by work for the last week and a half.

3. Piled high as it will go again due to clearing out file crate from closet. I even have about 6' of overflow to contend with.

I'm excited each time I tackle a new "container" though, whether crate, file box, cardboard box, etc. I can see the plan in my head and know where I am going with all this. At times I think "what a waste of time", but I always come back to the fact that this is fun for me, in some ways. It's a hobby, yes, but it ballooned out of control.

That's nothing new. I remember having boxes and boxes of paper and stuff as a kid. Catalogs, magazines, whatever. I even remember getting wallpaper sample books from a neighbor's parents. Those things kept me busy for a LONG time.

I graduated to magazines. I remember my bedroom in the apartment in West Chester being full of cardboard boxes that I never did anything with. Too busy having a social life back then! They all moved to Chicago wit me, where they say for another 2 years (and through two apartments) while I was busy with work and social lives.

Now that I'm too old to go out drinking every night, I can finally tackle the decluttering. Maybe I didn't care enough or want to do it enough back then. Now I do. So it's fun. I enjoy seeing the things that have interested me over the years (like that file I kept on Shabby Chic decorating...SO over that now!)

I just want to get to the point where my filing and reading and collecting and scanning are all on equal ground, time-wise. Like the Shabby Chic file...I kept it when I either had no means to purchase things to decorate in that style, or else I had the money, but couldn't find the file anyway! I want information that is meaningful to me at my fingertips, completely searchable and accessible in real-time. Is that asking too much?!