Time for sleep

It's been a crazy week, but it's so nice to come home and fall into bed when the craziness is all over (or almost all over), and actually realise that it's over. There's still work to do - lots and lots of works...months of it, in fact - but tonight there will be reading and early bedtime and, blissfully, sleep.

Happily, when I came home tonight a favourite catalogue was sitting in my mailbox. I'm not really one to catalogue shop, or even to look at them much, but I love thecatalogue from Toast...well...probably a little more than one should love a catalogue. The clothes are lovely and simple and very well made, and reading their catalogue is lovely, almost like reading a story.

Unfortunately, I can't seem to publish pictures tonight, but perhaps I'll share some of my favourites in the morning.

The Purge: The Beginning

Spring has snuck up on me again and, with it, the desire to get some spring cleaning done, and a bunch of stuff out my apartment at the same time.

I'm not afraid to admit I have a little...erm...thrift store habit. And by little, I mean more like a big ginormous one. I really like an awful lot of things that the thriftstore tends to have a lot of - vintage dishes, linens, cookbooks, craft supplies, novels, costume jewelery - and I really like the prices that they have too. There are photos of a bunch of my finds in the works, now that there's some natural light coming in after a very grey winter but, suffice it to say, I have a lot of stuff around.

I'm also not afraid to admit that I have a lot of interests. I cook a lot, knit a reasonable amount and crochet a bit, read, write, sew, exercise, run, dance. I'm trying to learn how to draw and paint a bit as well. In addition, I do the vast majority of my work here, since my campus office is not so great. As a result, I have a lot of stuff.

This isn't a blame game - it's all my stuff, and I take ownership of it, often quite proudly. But I'm not so proud of the sheer amount of it sometimes, and the fact that although my apartment is never in a shambles, it is frequently in some kind of disarray, and it's difficult to clean because of the amount of stuff that I have, especially in the limited amount of time that I have.

So, I'm on a bigger mission than spring cleaning this year. I'm purging since I haven't purged in...well, a while, I suppose. I can't actually remember, which is not such a good sign. Although there have been little purges here and there along the way, I'm aiming high this time.

How high?

I don't really know yet. Thus far I have two boxes, three large garbage bags, and five medium sized bags, plus a full bundle buggy (yes, the bundle buggy goes too), and a dressmaker's dummy (which still leaves me with two more of them - oops.) Other than the fact that the piles of stuff further increase the difficulty of cleaning up, I'm pretty proud of myself for what I've accomplished thus far. But it's not done yet. There's a lot more left to do, a lot more left to simplify, and I'm hoping that posting about it here occasionally will keep me noth motivated and accountable to finally get rid of a bunch of the stuff that's cluttering up my apartment and weighing me down.

Good news

Just as I was on my way out the door tonight, my email pinged at me. Upon checking it, I found that I've been accepted to present at a conference this summer after submitting an abstract almost two months ago now.

I'm feeling pretty proud. I've presented at some big name conferences before, but in more student-oriented capacities, or by invitation of someone I knew. I'm really proud of those conferences, and the work I did for them, but this one I feel especially proud of because it feels, moreso than the others, like this one was all me. I did the work and was accepted into a full fleged academic conference all by myself, on the merits of what I do, how I write, and how well I fit with what the organizers wanted. And, really, it feels pretty damn good.

But, given the supposedly serious academic nature of it all, perhaps I should stop referring to this as my "Big Girl Conference" soon.

Comments...*swoon*

I'm a sporadic blogger, and that's probably being really, really nice about it. When the academic stuff takes over, pretty much everything else winds up out the window. As such, my posting is rare, at best, and tends to be devoid of logic, theme, continuity, or (most importantly) images. I'd like to say I can change this, but I don't really know that I can right now - there's just too much that needs to be done now, and it seems like this space is one of the first bits to go by the wayside.

It saddens me sometimes, to see how little I do around here, and how few people are probably actually looking my way. But I have to admit, the fact that I've had two recent comments has made me very happy. I don't really think I should blog exclusively for other people, but knowing that someone was out there (38 or so posts into the life of this blog, yipes!) may have given me a bit of a shot of inspiration. Who knows...maybe I'll actually do something with this space one of these days, and reply to the nice people who said hi to me, once my email is once again functional.

Truthfully, I'd really like to.



So...where do I go from here?