Moving March

To put it mildly, I don’t know how people move with any regularity – then again – I’ve moved three times, that I actually remember, in probably 20 years. And they were: 1998, 2011, and 2012. And the moves in 2011 and 2012 weren’t really complete moves. I was moving to my first actual apartment and didn’t end up actually taking absolutely everything I owned. The 2012 move was me returning to my parent’s house – so again, not a super rushed move, as I knew it was happening for a while before it went down. And I managed the last half of it while driving 3 hours each way to help train a new store’s employees.

I would not do THAT again willingly.

I’ve reached a point where I realize that I need to do a whole lot of purging this move. A whole lot. Almost 80% of the things in my parent’s house that “belong” to me probably needs to be thrown out.

Some of it precedes the original move from Kentucky to Tennessee – and I honestly do not know why it has reappeared from my parent’s stash of stuff – as I fully expected a good half of it to have gotten thrown out years ago.

My mother will deny she’s a hoarder until she’s blue in the face, but she’s wrong. She is a hoarder – how else do you explain the fact that I’m being handed a tote of toys that should have been thrown out /years/ ago every time I see her now.

I know I’ve got the gene, and I’m generally losing against it. I’m slowly working on that, but it is exceedingly difficult. But, unlike the rest of my family, I’ll admit I’ve got the problem, and I also admit that I am working on it as best I can.

Some of the stuff that she’s brought me, I might save, most of it, though, probably not. I’m trying to limit everything I take with me now because I don’t want to have all the closets stuff full of totes anymore. I want to be able to use my dresser like you’re supposed to.

Part of my problem comes from the initial move that I remember – we went from a 4,000+ square foot house to less than 2,500 square feet, and we didn’t really get rid of a whole lot of stuff during the move.

In Kentucky, I’d had a 14 by 16 or so bedroom with dual closets, and a massive playroom that was comfortably twice that. Both my mother and father had offices in the house, we had a guest room and a dining room, an eat-in kitchen with a command center desk area (before those were even a thing in common house plans) and a massive living room.

In the Tennessee house, I’ve lived in for nearly 20 years, they had to share a single desk in a corner, what was my bedroom is 10 by 11 with a single closet and had to hold everything that belonged to me. Our kitchen was half the size, our dining room, foyer, living room, and office nook all shared the same area as an open layout. Don’t get me wrong, open layouts are great – when you plan for them with your furniture purchases. My mother didn’t have an open layout in the custom built home we had in Kentucky – so we had too much furniture for the open plan, though that didn’t stop my mother from stuffing several more furniture pieces in there over the years.

What does this mean concerning the things I’d owned? It means that quite a lot of it got put away in areas I couldn’t get to – and often due to the amount of furniture in my room, I couldn’t actually utilize everything like I should have been able to. Then, in about 2004, while I was on a people to people student ambassador program trip abroad, my mother gutted my room and redid it. On the one hand, I’d been wanting it done. On the other hand, I’d expected to be there. Coming home to that was one hell of a shock, and actually made me hate having anyone in my space without me there. I still have that issue now. I hate it when people are in my space, and I have very little trust for guests or visitors in my home.

Going forward, I hope to have the largest amount of “clutter” being my crafty things. Sewing, crochet, embroidery, chainmaille, calligraphy, paper arts, my bullet journal supplies, etc. I’m naturally inclined to be artsy, and it bugs me when I don’t have access to the items I need for crafting due to not having enough space to having a working craft area.

And while we’re at it, I’m rather hoping that we’ll be in this rental for a few years – that way when we move again, it can be into a custom built home, with all the amenities that we would like to have.

Truthful Thursday 0003

Hey folks! It’s a bit late night, but it’s still Thursday so I thought I’d throw a little Truthful Thursday out there! Well, ‘little’. If you’ve been around, you know that sometimes I’m extremely brief, and sometimes “long post ahoy” doesn’t even begin to express that the post ahead is long.

At the moment, I have no idea how long this post will be, but I can say with certainty that it’s not going to be brief.

Read more “Truthful Thursday 0003”

Truthful Thursday 0002

Hi folks, AM Devine here, popping in to say a quick hello and to give you a probably way too long life-website-writing update.

LIFE:

If you’ve been around a while, or got bored and read the archives, then you’ll know I’ve got a nice quiet job now. Well, a nice job now. Sometimes it’s not so quiet, but that’s okay. I mentioned in the past that I was glad to have a job that was going to be a Monday through Friday thing, and while I am glad to be here, we’ve yet to actually make it to the Monday through Friday part. Why? Because one of the shifts doesn’t have someone to work it. It’s generally a hard shift to fill anyway, and it’s been since January that they’ve been trying to get it filled. Twice they’ve thought they had someone and twice it has been a bust. Even if they hired someone tomorrow, it wouldn’t be until January that they’d be ready for their shift.

The medical things I was trying to take care of didn’t quite work out the way I was hoping they would, but I did come out with a diagnosis of three things, and hopefully I’ll be able to start actually getting that under control as time goes by. I’m also going to be reattempting to line myself back up for a near total gluten free life again. I felt so much better while I was doing that a couple of years ago that I’m planning on doing it again.

WRITING:

NaNoWriMo 2016 is SPACE THEMED, and basically I can’t get over how badass that is. Don’t mind me. I freaking love space. Space is so seriously up there in my list of favorite things it’s kinda crazy. (I’m aiming to buy all the gear this year. I mean… is anyone actually surprised?)

I’m going to be doing a lot more than what I’ve got listed on the NaNoWriMo website this year, mostly because I’m trying to get a project together for TOR’s submission window, and while I know the whole plot and could probably crank out a thousand words per day on it – I’ve got NaNoWriMo things to get done as an ML. So I’m going to crank out the rest of that story during NaNoWriMo because it’s still in need of nearly 20,000 words and I like watching the bar rise.

I’m going to be working on at least one Aurora Story during the event as well. I do know that I’ll probably be doing more on my Indigo/Bronze/Marigold series that I’ve been kinda plotting on for the last 10 months. I hope to come out of this NaNoWriMo with at least one complete first draft MS, completed plotlines for I+B+M, and possibly even worked out plotline problems in the Aurora Universe. Also during NaNoWriMo, I hope to add a chapter to each of my currently active fanfictions over on AO3, as well as draft a whole separate fanfiction of off the Star Trek Word Crawls that I’m writing.

WEBSITE:

So, in case you are new, I redid my blog’s hosting and the theme. I really like this theme, and I’m actually looking forward to the day when I have pictures to plug in for the slideshow. I’ll be completely revamping my author website sometime in the next couple of months, or at least before my birthday in May, as well.

Am I ever going to have forums? I have no idea anymore. I used to have forums on three different occasions. The first couple, the program locked up and just would not let me back in and I lost a few dozen things I wish I’d had hard copies of. The third time I never actually finished setting them up. Never actually had a reason to finish them.

Okay, that’s enough rambling for now. I’ll see you folks hopefully on Monday!

Truthful Thursdays 0001

Okay, so, TRUTHFUL THURSDAYS.

This week’s Truthful Thursday is going to be about why I was silent for ages. If you’ve been around for a while, or read back in the archives, my TERRIBLE MUNDANE JOB as an old person caretaker was considerably short staffed. And I was expecting them to stay short staffed until at least mid-march. Well here it is, partway through May, and we’re finally staffed correctly. Well, mostly. I had put in a two weeks’ notice of resignation about two weeks ago.

I have been working two jobs nearly daily since the end of March, and am so glad that it’s over. While I will miss some of the people I took care of, I honestly won’t miss the job at all. Most importantly, I’m glad to have a Monday through Friday job where the schedule doesn’t change on a whim. It’s not as much money as I’ve been making, but I expect to be able to get some serious writing done from here on out. (Hopefully, I’ll be able to get my shit in gear and actually get a publishing schedule locked down and going.)

I now have this lovely mundane job that allows me a full 40 hours a week, I can pay my bills and it’s closer to home as it stands now. This awesome mundane job allows me a bit of down time, where I’ve got nothing actually going on during the shift but can’t leave the desk. I’ll be setting up a schedule of how I’m going to be doing things (writing, studying, research, etc) during each of my shifts once I’ve gotten the hang of how the actual shift is going to run. (I’m currently studying French on Duolingo and working through math on Khan Academy – and I’m planning on dedicating at least an hour a day to each once I’m settled.) I’m hoping to be fluent enough in French by the end of the summer to go ahead and purchase and read a couple of books that I’ve wanted for ages and ages.

Remember, for TRUTHFUL THURSDAYS, you can always ask me a question. Put questions in the comments below, send them to me on twitter, comment them on Instagram. I will answer as many questions as I can in 500 words. (This will probably be 2 or 3 questions at a time.)