Week 20: Trying to get organized

19 weeks.

One more week until the halfway point, which is great – sadly, it’s at least 6 weeks, if not more, until the average highs are in the 70′s, meaning it still gets miserably hot whenever we try to get anything done in and around the house.

There are a few more signs of life in the belly, I think… I occasionally get a poke or prod, but it’s still so infrequent that I’m never sure if it’s Small Monster or, say, dinner. Christian is cheering the kid on to kick his mother, which is fine right now, but I hope he realizes he’s only going to get away with that for the next 4.5 months or so – after that, I will demonstrate to him the property of kicking retaliation, which states the party responsible for encouraging the kick is the party that will pay for the kick. I’m uncoordinated, but I’m pretty good at kicking people’s butts when they cause trouble, so watch out, tall boy

I am desperately organizing my study – as usual, when I clean, it gets much worse before it gets better, and I think the study is now at maximum entropy. Part of the problem is that I moved my desk and some other furniture to both accommodate a couple of bookshelves we bought months ago as well as to use the space a little better, so crap from my desk and everywhere else is all over the place.

The worst of it, though, is that this stupid shelf I assembled last night and this morning is the most poorly constructed/designed piece of do-it-yourself furniture I’ve ever had the chance to meet. It looked like a solid piece of mostly-wooden furniture when we saw it (although it was clear – we thought – that the Kmart flunkie who’d put the display model together had poor skills), and it is in fact fairly sturdy now that it’s put together, but the actual parts used were flimsy and broke for no apparent reason other than that the directions were clearly suboptimal and the “metal” in the cam screws was about as non-malleable as, oh, say, lead. Also, many of the parts did not exactly fit together, which was very exciting for me personally. I had to use the “angry hammer” method of making them fit. By the time I was done, I was about ready to use the “angry hammer” method of reducing the damned thing to the woody particles from which it was formed, but opted not to, since I was too tired to anyway.

I had to improvise, and a pregnant tired woman who can barely lift the parts is not going to be pleased when things start breaking. I was in serious danger of doing something stupid, like accidentally epoxying my fingers together. I was really about to cry last night, but finally I got the bastard put together this morning (although I did manage to put that stupid cardboard “wood-like backing” on facing the wrong way in the end, but seriously, I think the printed “wood grain” on those things looks like crap anyway, and after putting in 40 out of 54 nails and all of the hassle with the thing yesterday, there was no way in Hell I was taking the backing off and starting again), and the working area of my study (as opposed to the more lounge-like bits) is finally put together, if not organized.

It is, though, getting much harder to get things done physically, and I still need to get some more curtains made, my study organized, and the last major reorganization of the upstairs done before the baby comes. I know that’s still a ways off, but considering that most of this has to take place while the heat is still making me miserable, I’m a little overwhelmed.

I swear, when I finish this study, I’m taking a picture of it and framing it. (Probably because once it’s organized, that’s the last time it ever will be… There’s a reason my husband calls me “Entropy”…)