taking stock

I love making lists. I love paper. I love sorting things.

But I get distracted. Unless I'm very, very clear before I start making my lists, I can so enjoy the process that I get quite lost. I get lost in the lists themselves, making lists of lists. I get lost in the things I'm sorting, wandering off to wherever the things take me.

Take the process of taking stock of my fridge, for example.

Yesterday, I started thinking that cleaning out my fridge was long over-due, but before I could do anything, I needed to eat something like breakfast. Knowing I had only one lovely purple plum in the way of fruit, besides the cranberries (and I don't know what I plan to do with them!), I realized I'd have to get some groceries, just to eat breakfast, otherwise I would be too faint to do anything.

That meant I'd have to get dressed and that would require a shower so I'd be presentable out there in public...Oh, tried a few deep-knee bends and squats first. My balance is just a little off because of the broken toe I had on the left foot. If I concentrate, my balance is nearly 100%. However, my left knee is still a little swollen from the arthroscopic surgery last week. Maybe it's only the tapes on the skin limiting my range of motion; notice ugly grating noise in right knee. Sigh.

Seems I'm working backwards, doesn't it?

Without any organization, I ran off to the grocery store, buying some things I generally like for breakfast, trying not to get carried away, reminding myself that going crazy would only be wasteful if these foodstuffs were left to spoil while I was away in New York City and then British Columbia over the next couple of weeks...

The cab driver, whom I've gotten to know, very kindly carried my groceries up the stairs right to my door.

Home again, I realized that to make room, I should discard whatever containers of left-overs were still lingering from Thanksgiving. Besides, I know I'm not going to be able to face even a wee snack of anything from Thanksgiving anymore, even if it's fine because it's frozen...

Then, after I put most of the perishable groceries away, I took a little time to eat that very-belated breakfast. Yup, as you might imagine, I was feeling faint by this time. Ahh, but I enjoyd my coffee and I had a new running magazine to mull over with CBC radio in the background.

Then, I started cleaning up the kitchen, washing those containers from Thanksgiving. But not before I realized that the tea towels in the kitchen needed to be replaced with clean ones. So then I sorted out all of the laundry that needs doing (I'll get the laundry done tomorrow)...before wandering back to the kitchen to finish washing the dishes.

While putting dishes away, I remembered my vitamins: a multivitamin, glucosamine, vitamin B6 and B12, cod-liver oil capsules, and an herbal combo to alleviate the symptoms of menopause. Should I re-examine what I'm taking, I wondered?

Then I watered my house plants,
fussed that the plants I brought indoors from their summer places in pots out on the steps are still willy-nilly in baskets and need to be sorted out and potted up for the winter, and the plants that will go in the garden need to go in soon. Should I get some bulbs too? Is it too late, or would the squirrels just dig them all up? How am I going to handle carrying around heavy soil or digging anything right now? Fall will soon be winter and I can't catch up.



I potted up the amaryllis bulb I bought while out grocery shopping.

I noticed the water in the vase of fall flowers on my coffee table is getting rather thick! Hmmmnn...decide to deal with some of this later.


Must check my emails. Reply to most pressing ones, make dates to meet friends over the next few days and enter those in calendar. Remember that the insert in the running magazine has directions for the supporters (that would be me and Jim on this trip) on how to get to various points along the race route in New York City (make note to take this along this evening and share with Jim and the rest of my running gang.)

Then I went back to what my intentions had been at the beginning, to take stock of my fridge. Taking stock of my fridge was supposed to fit in with making meal plans to improve my nutrition and dove-tail with a nenewed regimen to get my fitness back on track, a regimen that somehow takes into account my responsibilities at my paying job, as well as allowing me to make time to continue my studies, spend time with my family and to have a social life.

I realized that this is all part of the process I had hoped to begin here, to describe how I'm taking steps to get my life back on track, to set new goals and priorities, to follow through on some of my prior plans...and it seems I'm simply tossing some new balls into the air, dropping others, trying to juggle things much as I've always done, in circuitous fits and starts which bear no resemblance to organization! I told you it was going to get ugly!

Ah! But as I finished this note, the sun peeked out of the grey sky and started playing with the yellow, gold and ruby leaves outside my window. It was as if the leaves and the sun were smiling at each other. The branches waved and danced, and leaves twirled down to carpet the pavement.

And I thought to myself, yesterday I did accomplish something, after all. It might not be perfect, but that's all right. Sometimes, it is in lingering over mundane tasks that one's interior life has the time to get clearer, mellow, ripen. The sun agrees with me. It came out again to bestow a positively beaming smile upon the leaves. And the leaves are nodding, dancing.

random relatedness:

Taking stock of Canada's worst peacetime maritime disaster

A list: 33 things that make us crazy

43 things, dream it, list it, do it

Ontario Fall Colour report

Ain't No Sunshine, Bill Withers on You Tube

Un rayon de soleil, William Baldé on You Tube

Cité Soleil, an indictment of the misrepresentations of the news by mainstream media