Last night when I got home, I felt kind of worn out and grumpy. Steve wasn’t home yet, and I parked my tuckus in front of the TV to give myself a pedicure. This means I did exactly zero organizing yesterday.

I’ve since figured out that the way to motivate myself is by visualizing a project’s “before” state, and then fantasizing about the “after” photo. If I don’t think about a project beforehand, then I have absolutely no motivation to even begin the tasks required. I would find myself standing in the room or in front of the area to be tackled, just kind of absent-mindedly scratching my noggin with no intention of getting down to business.

Tonight I take a train ride up to New York City. The bad news, aside from missing my honey, is that this is a check-in-check-out-spend-the-day-in-a-conference-room-and-back-on-the-train kind of trip – my least favorite kind.

The good news is that I’ve got my trusty notebook so that I can zone out on the train rides and really think about the nitty gritty that needs to be done at home.

I only have 3 and a half days and a roughly 7 evenings worth of free time (currently unscheduled anyway) before my birthday, so it’s time to really catalog my tasks and get crackin’ on the execution of it all. I’m getting awfully excited thinking about what the place is going to look like when I’m through.

And in the end, a really fantastic outcome of all this will be that I will finally have a sound indoor office space -- not to knock the outdoor home office, but when it’s raining or super insanely cold out, well, it’s nice to easily transition to the comfy luxury of the great indoors.

I’m sort of in this weird holding pattern with the book right now. I can either decide that I’ve reached the end of the book and go back in there and add to it from the middle with more scenes to really flesh things out. Or I can decide that our heroine wants to continue on her messy journey and keep on writing out into a future timeline.

Extending the storyline sounds like a royal pain in the arse, since I had the story arc ‘just so’ with all these different moving pieces and everything got all wrapped up into a pretty bow at the end. If our heroine keeps trundling along, then I would either need to tear apart the package and rework it, or I would have to create a whole new set of problems and resolutions for everybody. Blah blah blah.

So while I let all of this percolate, I’ve begun to get absolutely obsessed with the clutter in our apartment. I like to say that Steve and I are crammed into a one bedroom apartment for now, as if this crowded situation will be remedied soon enough with more space. We all know this is absolute horse hockey, as with more space inevitably comes more  S T U F F  to fill it up. And with the market as it is, we are going to be living here for at least another year.

With that realization, the discomfort of our living situation is finally bugging the living crap out of me. There is clutter everywhere.  It’s a very irritating and unwelcoming feeling to walk into our apartment when you’re instantaneously assaulted with a bike, a trash can and two bags of golf clubs. And that’s just the foyer.

Last night, I chugged two glasses of wine with dinner, stuffed my face with some chips and then went totally nuts. This morning I had three trash bags filled to go out, and I have only just begun. I have a very detailed plan of attack to trim the fat, and by the end of this mission, everything left in our apartment will have a home. No more full wardrobe sitting on the dining room table. No more running into furniture because the path to get by is fraught with clutter. Oh, about that. It’s sad when you get used to sporting massive bruising on one leg because you repeatedly crash into the same sharp edge of an end table. There have actually been jokes made about childproofing the furniture for my benefit.

Hold me, I’m frightened. While there’s a lull at work, I’m going to hop down to the gym and see how I do at running five miles.

I just had an Aha! Moment. I am procrastinating going to the gym by posting about it here.

I’m procrastinating on a work assignment by going to the gym.

I almost fooled myself.

Okay, off to the gym now.

UPDATE - That was painful.