(Note: Click on any of the photos in this entry to go to their place in my Flickr photostream. Most of them have informative notes added to them there.)

OK! I admit it: I like to think of myself as an organized person. And, on the whole, it’s true. I alphabetize my CDs. I remember dates obssessively. Organizational tools turn me on–I drool over items from the Container Store. Half the people I babysat for have hired me again to reorganize their closets.

But, all organizational tendencies aside, this past year has taken a heavy toll on my room. It all started sometime last summer when I discovered that my hangers were making little pooks in the shoulders of some of my nice sweaters… and I read somewhere that it’s best to fold your knits instead of hanging them. So, in an attempt to implement this strategy, I pulled down all my sweaters, and many of my knit tops, and folded them in a tray that I set underneath the hanging storage in my closet. This worked out great… for approximately one minute. That is, until I actually needed to get anything from this tray. Pretty soon, as you can imagine, my folded clothes were merely a jumbled mess. And once school started, I didn’t have any more time to devote to projects like my closet.

To make a long story short… I pretty much had to admit recently that my room has looked like the before scenes from Mission: Organization or Neat for several months now. Which is pretty distressing, for someone who values organization. Living with clutter also affects my ability to work well… but because I’m so behind with school, I don’t have time to clean it up: a vicious cycle!

Enter the heroine extraordinaire: My mother! If I have any organizational abilities, she has them times ten, plus many years more experience. I look forward to one day achieving her level of organization. Of course, she thinks that she’s not that organized… silly her. THIS Is what she did in the course of last night and this morning: (Flickr notes explain how it’s organized; click on the pic for details.)

If you do not think this looks awesome, well… it’s probably because that’s not a very good picture. Also because I didn’t take any ‘before’ pictures, and you did not get them aherm benefit of seeing my previous cough ‘clothing situation’.

Here’s another shot of the gorgeousness:

An organized closet also has the added bonus of making your clothes look better. Suddenly I feel less of a need to go shopping. And I think we can all agree that is a good thing.

But you know how great my mother is? She’s so great, she didn’t even stop at the closet. She’s helping me reorganize the rest of my room… all the while allowing me the time to work on my needy schoolwork. That is how awesome my mom is. Also awesome is my impressive collection of Spongebob and Star Wars memorabilia, now exiled to two small shelves:

This, obviously, is the part of the room she hasn’t worked on yet:

Actually, that’s not strictly true. Most of that junk is on the bed because it’s in the process of being organized into the rest of the room. But it serves as a good example of what my room looked like ALL OVER before she even got started. =-o All right! That’s enough picspam for now. I have more photos over at Flickr if you are interested. You can be sure to expect more photos from the conclusion of this and future organizing projects.

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… and that one thing that I haven’t done for a week. (Hint: It starts with BL.) I would like to say that the reason I haven’t blogged in a week is that I am not one of those pathetic internet losers who has no social life and must spend countless hours on the net to justify their existence, but the truth is, I am one of those losers.

Also, the real reason I haven’t written is that I’m still way behind with my schoolwork. Homeschooling is awesome, in the way that it provides so much flexibility in schedule and activities, it lets you control your own curriculum, and it saves you from a lot of the social politics of public highschools… but at the same time, it doesn’t provide quite the same pressure to get one’s assignments done on time. Which, for chronic procrastinators like me, is kind of a necessary pressure.

But I can’t really blame it on homeschooling, because I know plenty of public schoolers who have the same problems. So I guess really I just need to learn to motivate myself. Ah, there’s the rub.

Oh! Also, I left my cars’ lights on again today while I was at work!! So, as you can see, I am just ALL KINDS OF AWESOME today.

P.S.: Lest anyone should be confused, I actually do have a social life. And have been busy. But I also spend too much time on the internet, and am behind on school. :-p

Man. Valentine’s Day is like Halloween for grownups. At least it was for me this year. Between the candy from parents, the candy from friends, the candy which I had to buy at work because it was half price…

Conspicuously absent, you’ll notice, is candy from Elijah. There is a good reason for this. That reason is: He FORGOT ABOUT VALENTINE’S DAY. Yes, folks, you heard it right… he FORGOT. ABOUT VALENTINE’S DAY. cough Now that I’ve rubbed that in a little… Honestly, it was okay, because on Monday night we got together and watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, which I had never seen (and is hilarious), and just generally had ourselves a fun time. So I’m not bitter.

Lost spoiler alert: What was up with Lost last night? It’s getting weirder by the episode, I’m tellin’ ya. Nobody seemed to be acting like their respective characters. It struck me as so strange that Locke would be the one telling Sayid to go ahead with the interrogation… that seemed like a much more Jack-like thing to do. But Ol’ Jacko seemed to actually be the reasonable one in this episode. Sehr strange. Maybe they all just have the island ’sickness’. Hmmm.

Oh, randomly: I noticed that someone searched for “Procrastination and Schoolwork” on Google and it brought them here… in fact, Lylium.org was on the first page. This strikes me as both rather funny and rather cool… makes me want to write more about the struggles of procrastination for my “procrastination and schoolwork” audience.

Guess what! It snowed this morning! If this does not sound like exciting news, you obviously have not spent very many winters in Oregon. The default winter landscape in these parts is rain or sun. This winter, in particular, we have had so much rain that Oregon has lived up to its reputation as a drenched state. But when it’s not raining, we just have cold, clear skies. (Which, incidently, can be just as beautiful as snow. )

But this morning we had honest to goodness Valentine’s Day snow!

It didn’t stick, of course. By this afternoon it had completely melted away, leaving no trace but a small buildup on the bottom of our cars’ windshields, which my friends did not fail to mold into projectiles and fling at me after class. Now, as I look outside, it is bright, sunny, and completely devoid of residual snow. Ah well.

But really, we are quite unaccustomed to snow here. Two years ago, we had unprecedented INCHES of snow on the ground on New Years’ Day. The city just about ground to a halt. In every neighborhood, children burst out of their houses covered from head to toe in puffy winter gear, toting toboggans and snow-shoeing their way down the streets. OKAY. Maybe it wasn’t quite that bad, but we sure didn’t know it. There were actual inches of snow on the ground, people! Inches! Suffice to say, we get excited about snow in Oregon.

Why the weather chose to dump a tantalizing bit of snow on us this morning, I don’t know. It’s certainly the first real snow we’ve had all winter… and probably the last, as well. Oh well. I’ll just look forward to the half centimeter we’ll undoubtedly get next year.

This afternoon, my parents and brother and I drove out to Coburg, where Gutenberg College has just purchased property. This property currently houses a former church building and a run down house, but hopefully sometime within the next year or two it will house Gutenberg!

I’ve posted a bum-load of photos from the afternoon on Flickr. I am beginning to believe it will soon be necessary for me to buy a pro account. I already have almost fifty pictures on there; I don’t want my stream to get cut off at 200! =-o Also, if I had pro I could just make a set of the photos from today, but I don’t want to oust the sets I already have. So, in lieau of that, I will link to the archives of pictures taken today. You can find them HERE.

And, before anyone asks: Yes, I did get the idea for my sidebar navigation from Gutenberg’s site. But I did some digging in their code and they took the script from Dynamic Drive so I don’t really feel bad.

I had an encounter with a special human being tonight at work. She came toddling in with her parents, a vision with her puffy pink raincoat and long, messy blond hair. She looked 2-ish, about the same age as Leta. After the young family walked in the door, her dad scooped her up and set her on his shoulders. She sat there, her chin resting on the top of his head and her arms hanging down, totally unphased to be so much farther from the ground than she normally was.

As her mom and dad looked around up by the front, I caught her eye from behind the cash register, and gave her a huge grin. And sure enough, her eyes lit up, and she sat up and gave me a huge grin back. And it was love. I made some silly faces at her and she started to giggle, her parents totally oblivious to our budding friendship.

After a few minutes of shopping around the store, she came riding back up to the checkstand on her Dad’s shoulders. She didn’t seem to notice me, so I just proceeded with ringing her parents up. All of a sudden: “ToooDOOooooo!” She trilled. I looked up, and she was pointing right at me with a look of surprised glee on her face, as if she had just found her favorite stuffed animal again. Needless to say, I was pleased as punch, and waved “Hi!” right back at her.

As her parents carried her out of the store, she sang “Buh-bye!” She scrunched up her nose and eyes and gave me a huge, baby-teeth-filled grin that said quite clearly “We are totally the bestest friends ever.”

And I totally agreed.

As you may have noticed, I’ve done some further work towards customizing my layout. See esp: new navigation on right sidebar. How do you think it looks? Does the script work correctly in your browser? (I’d be especially interested in Safari or Mac IE, as I have access to neither.) It’s supposed to be a list of expanding menus that drop down when you click on them.

Also! I finally got the site to validate for CSS and XHTML. Yay! That was a bit of a headache, chasing down those little problems and their nit-picky solutions, but all in all it feels good to have a ‘validated’ site.

I don’t have much else to say, mainly due to the fact that I enjoyed approximately THREE hours of sleep last night. =-o I did, however, turn in a satisfactory first draft. But I do not have the energy for a longer, more interesting post tonight. Sorry.

Oh, Lost is new tomorrow! Boo ya!

The Knight library is a magical place. A day spent at the library is well spent indeed… for me, at least. It has the manifold benefits of:

• Being a fun outing
• Having magnificent resources
• Removing me from my native environment, thereby making it harder to get distracted and easier to concentrate.

I didn’t truly discover the wonder of the library until we had to start doing research papers last fall. Before that I had mainly stayed on the ground floor, using the computers for internet research and ocasionally venturing upstairs to use the quiet reading room. But for some reason, I had never had occasion to look for any books there until last fall. Imagine how shocked I was to turn around on that stair landing and discover… a world of books!

There really is something about wandering through those stacks of books, clutching a scribbled call number in one hand and scanning the spines of countless tomes. The first time I did it, I felt like I could probably take on the world singlehandedly; I mean, here was information about any subject I could imagine. I don’t know how to properly communicate how exciting that was.

Tonight was probably the longest session I’ve spent at the library yet. But it really helped me nail down the focus of the antsy paper I have due on Tuesday. It’s strange, though, how the ideas in the works I’m reading seem so much more imminent and important while I’m at the library. While I’m there, I feel free to let my mind explore the arguments at leisure, spending lengthy amounts of time accomplishing nothing but thinking. But as soon as I get in my car to come home, the mundane life slips back into focus and those lofty ideas are pushed into the background for the time being. Interesting.

So, thank you, Knight library! Thank you for your comfortable chairs, your plentiful nooks in which to study, your good computers and of course, your books.

Ever notice how much we do in an attempt to fulfill ourselves in this life? I don’t know about you, but I tend to live every second of every day with the suspicion that if I ‘just had that one magic thing’ or ‘that one magic habit’ or ‘did things that one magic way’ I would suddenly be productive and beautiful and popular and successful and righteous and full of energy. If I would only get organized. If I would only get an iPod. If I would only write more frequently in my blog. Then my life would be better. Just you wait and see.

But that, for better or worse, is not the world in which we live. One by one, those strategies let us down. Even if I do get organized, I will fall into disorganization again soon enough. Even if I do get that iPod, it probably won’t live up to the greatness I imagined before I had it. Even if we successfully pull off all of our plans to better ourselves, where do we end up? Staring the hard, cold truth in the face: this stuff does not bring meaning to our lives. It brings only emptiness. Sure, we can make temporary adjustments. We can slap on a patch that makes us feel better for a little while. But none of it lasts

My Dad has called this human syndrome “medication by shopping.” He was referring specifically to the use of material objects as ‘patches’ to make us feel better; but I would like to extend his metaphor to include desire for friends, success, and popularity as ‘medications’. If you think about it, we go through life as if we were a dam about to burst. Our foundation is criss-crossed with cracks, and we reach frantically for things to stop the gaps. We grasp after objects, fashion, people, success, whole identities, as ways to fill the cracks in our life. But it makes no difference; these solutions are fleeting, and we fall apart just the same. We need a bigger fix.

I bring all of this up, because I, personally, have really been struggling with this recently. I tend to blame my problems on procrastination, on not getting enough sleep, on some variables in a given situation that aren’t quite right. And I search, whether consciously or not, for ’solutions’ like spending more time on the internet, like mentally refusing to start working on one thing until another thing is just perfect, or like avoiding the work altogether. And the whole while I’m thinking… “If I would only set up this one kind of file system… or get this one kind of alarm clock… or buy these kinds of clothes… then I would feel better about myself and be able to work.”

We are excellent at setting up straw men to take the blame away from ourselves; and, ultimately to distract us from He who is the One, the only solution to our problems. But even having written all this, I know I will not suddenly change. This post, like everything I’ve mentioned, is not a solution. It is a call to consider what is really important, and what is really causing our problems, and Who can really fix them.

This is pretty freakin’ sweet:

It’s an ASCII me! Make an ASCII you, and show me what it’s like.

(You have to stand far back from your monitor to properly appreciate this phenomenon)