crowdog66 ◾ ◾ Eight hours of "gentle exercise"

Today I spent eight hours at my mother's apartment -- searching, sorting, throwing away, and packing. I think I've broken the back of the beast and have a great sense of accomplishment, but I am VERY tired (yet strangely energized at the same time, and more hopeful than I was yesterday that everything will turn out all right). My psych nurse was advising me to get back into regular activity by doing "gentle exercise" at first, and today, with all its lifting and walking up and down stairs, certainly qualifies. I brought in a ghetto blaster and tuned it to talk radio so I wouldn't feel so conscious of my aloneness through the course of the day.

We've made arrangements to move on Monday morning to a storage facility not far away from where we live. Another one down... there's still stuff to do, but that was a big organizational headache that has now disappeared (unless either the moving company or the storage facility starts playing silly buggers, but it's best not to go borrowing trouble -- I'll deal with that if and when it happens).

Tomorrow morning George and I will go down to the storage facility to do the paperwork and pay the first month-plus-one-week's rental. Later in the afternoon I have an appointment with my psych nurse, but other than that I have several hours available to work on HB. Saturday is currently wide open -- more work time! -- and on Sunday I'll go down to my mother's place and wrap things up, at least as far as the moving of furniture and a few long-term storage boxes go. There'll still be stuff left in the apartment, including several bags of clothes and boxes of stuff for Goodwill, which are being picked up on Thursday.

On Tuesday

bodi_kat has agreed to join me at the apartment, at which time I'll move some more boxes over to our place and deliver a whole whack o' cat toys to a local animal rescue shelter (if she's agreeable to the trips). On Thursday both

bodi_kat and Terri have offered to come to my mother's place and help me do the final clean-up... I found the caretaker's list of what has to be done in terms of cleaning under the door this morning, and man oh man, did THAT provoke a panic attack. I HATE cleaning at the best of times, and the idea of pulling out the refridgerator and stove and scrubbing behind them fills me with dread, oh yes it does.

I did get out of the apartment today long enough to have lunch at Joey's Fish and Chips; decent food, but small portions. On the way back from lunch, I stopped at the Goodwill in my mother's area and got a couple of extra boxes out of them as well as some more bags for clothes. (Note to self: ask

bodi_kat if she's also willing on Tuesday to pick up some more bags from Goodwill so I can pack up my mother's coats, or perhaps even take them over to one of the womens shelters who provide coats on loan for women who need to go to job interviews. My mother had some LOVELY coats.)

Off to have a hot bath and get something to eat. I might do some HB work tonight; I'll see how much of my remaining energy the hot water saps out of me.

A moment of sadness/happiness today: I found one of the turbans my mother used to wear to conceal her lack of hair, and when I sniffed it, it smelled just like her.