I sorted through stuffed animals yesterday. I’m too sentimental and anthropomorphize too much. I had to say goodbye to the Sesame Street characters and lots of bears and other adorable critters. The only way to do it was to keep telling myself some children were going to find and love them. It’s not like I don’t have any for myself. I have a bin full of Christmas critters and I kept any Iqbal gave to me. Alex had already pulled out the most meaningful to him.

Well, it took only five days to get back to working in my art room. Besides the stuffed animals, I also broke down some boxes, but today was more work (sort of). All the boxes were put into the recycle bin. All the empty bins are now stacked next to the shed to be stored there. (The shed is the next clean up & clear out project.) That left a lot more room. I dragged the chest of drawers to the opposite wall and brought in (dragged again) the computer desk. Tomorrow I hope to bring in the long shelves and the art desk. We’ll see.

This is a NOT-TO-SCALE sketch of the room.

The brown chair by the hutch and the black one by the storage room door may have to go. My sketch makes it look like there is more room than there actually is. There will be room to move around, but no extra space.

The computer I use here doesn’t have wifi, so I may not have any internet connection with it, though maybe I’ll get a splitter for Iqbal’s connection. His den is just across the storage room. Or . . . If I can pull the cable to this side of the basement. . .

There is also a blanket chest in the room now. It will go into the sewing room because it’s filled with scraps. One day, maybe, I will sort them . . . by size and/or by color. Or maybe I’ll just use them as I pull them out. I dunno. All I know is that, over all, I find the scraps more intriguing or inspiring that the larger cuts of cloth, although I’m very happy to have larger pieces, too.

Not much is happening.

I’ve been reading. This past week I read two books. Spooky Little Girl by Laurie Notaro, which was actually a reread, but I had forgotten it and only remembered it bit by bit as I read. Anyway, its a very fun read and I would recommend it. The other book was a collection of short stories. Monstress by Lysley Tenorio. This was also very good, though not light. A bit more literary maybe. Stories that make one think about things. I enjoyed it and even whipped through it in an afternoon and two evenings.

As I went to my LibraryThing to check exact titles and authors, I discovered that my catalog is still not up to date. One book was listed and one wasn’t. That means that I have to redo the shelf I grabbed both from. I thought that one was finished. I keep trying to get Iqbal to do it. After all, he was a librarian! He obviously doesn’t want to do it, though, even though I told him he could assign Library of Congress classification numbers. Oh, well.