Why I've Been Missing for a Couple of Days

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Monday was a really bad day. The beating heart woke me up too early and kept me awake too long to get my full night's rest. My friend who comes to help with cleaning was due that afternoon, and I need to work with her in the garage for about an hour. I didn't really feel up to it, but I did what I had to. Tuesday I was feeling normal, but I needed to catch up with other things, like paying bills, cooking, etc. Wednesday my friend came again and we had an entire afternoon working on the garage project. We are sorting, decluttering, throwing away and recycling the stuff I have no use for and no one else would want. My younger friend does the heavy physical work and I have to make decisions about what goes where and sort some of what she uncovers. You see her in the photo. I pay her for helping but I work alongside her. Having her help motivated me to get my part done. This garage contains stuff we brought over in a hurry from the mobile home where my mother-in-law spent her last months after she died and our former tenants wanted to move back in at once. I found a whole suitcase full of new sheets still in the packages. I gave some to my friend who had beds the right size. The ones neither of us can use I may try to sell. I was delighted to also find my floating row covers in time for a hard freeze that night. I've been using old tee-shirts to cover my delicate plants but it's a pain to go out and remove them in the morning, and I sleep long after the sun is up. Now I can just leave them on my plants day and night until it warms up again. We worked hard yesterday, but still hardly made a dent. One reason the job is so hard is that before I moved here full time, some vandals broke into the house. I may have written about it here, but it was three or four years ago. They went into the garage and started emptying boxes and throwing everything around, and it was hard for me to get to every thing to clean it up. I was too busy planting and keeping the garden up, and I was also still in business then. So the garage contains merchandise left from my book business, gardening stuff, and things left over from my mother-in-law's house that was left after the estate sale that I hadn't had time to sort through. Some of what my mom had stored there is also still there. I'm hoping we will get rid of all the junk, organize what's left, and donate what I will never use before I die. The job will take several more hours to complete spread out between many different days. Then we also have to tackle what's in the house, and what's in the other house. If we ever finish the job this house may actually be livable again. After my friend went home and I had dinner and rested for a bit, I had to get a blog post up on my gardening blog and catch up with social networking. Today we had medical appointments in San Luis Obispo, and that meant going to Costco afterward while we were in that city. Then I had to start unloading the food from the car when we got home. We only get to Costco about once every month or two because it's so far, so it takes a lot of time and energy to unload when we get home. I still have non-food items to unload tomorrow. Also tomorrow I have to do another blog post and make a batch of chili. I'm soaking the beans tonight. I'm going to try it with small white beans, since we aren't supposed to eat kidney or pinto beans anymore. I normally use kidney beans. I'll let you know how all this goes. I hope to catch up on comments tomorrow because I should get to bed now. The photo is a "before" photo I took after we'd been working in this section for about two hours. The smaller shelving set had been full of stuff we had to sort and rearrange before getting it clear and putting what you see now on it. The box contains a shelving unit like the larger one with the books. My friend put it together and we organized most of the gardening stuff on it before the day was over. The stuff in front of the shelves we still have to sort. And this is only half of the garage. The other half is a bit more organized, but still needs sorting.