A three-fold busy board

And . . . here's the three-fold "Busy Board" I made for my grandchild. I got the idea from an article about how these little fidget-able quilts are helpful for people with dementia -- a diagnosis that doesn't fit my grandchild -- but it reminded me of similar toys I'd had as a kid myself, and thought that she might appreciate it.  

Even if not, I had a bunch of fun thinking about what I might include, and since I made it entirely with stuff leftover from other crafts, it was good for entertaining one person in our family, at least.

I'd started with the idea of having a quilt with a bunch of different activities.  After I finished three squares, I was getting a bit to the end of my time/creativity, and decided that three squares worked well after all (and plus, my grandchild is turning three, so that's another reason to declare "done").

This is what it looks like folded up, with snaps to keep it rolled up.

The main ingredients for this gift was stuff leftover from the denim jeans my sister gave me: small scraps of fabric, a pocket, and zippers I'd removed for projects uncertain.  I also had a bunch of excess straps that I'd prepared when I was sewing face masks.  

This is what the Busy Board looks like opened up all the way.  

On the left, there is a weave pattern of straps,
with wooden beads on the vertical strips.

You can slide the beads up and down,
and they have to go over and under the horizontal straps as they slide.

I'd also snagged a small wallet from a neighbor's "Free For All" pile.   I figured that would be a nifty thing to have in the pocket. 

And the pocket unzips, for extra fun.

I sewed the wallet to a strap whose other end is attached to the Busy Board, 
so it won't get lost.

I also happened to have a bunch of mini spools.  So I used these kind of like large beads in the right-most square.

The strap threads back and forth through four "tunnels"
I added, with a spool (or a washer, because I ran out of spools) 
at each turn.  

This is more fun to play with than I thought it would be,
because you can't just pull on one spool; 
just like lacing up shoes, you kind of have to
tighten things up one section at a time.

Aside from the zippers on the pocket, the sewing for this project is basically straight lines and quite simple, so it'd be a fairly easy project for a novice at sewing.  

Et voila!  That's what I made for my granddaughter for her birthday this year.  

Update:  Kinderling says, "Bchild loves the busy book you made her! She takes it everywhere! Thank you!

I've been wanting to make one, so this is great"

Planning the rest of my life (or at least the next part of it)

 In the "Journey to Retiring" series:

You know how you get to the end of an eight-year plan, where everything has snapped right into place just as you'd scheduled it to, and now with the eight years all done, you find yourself oddly directionless?  

Actually, I know that most other people don't operate like that, but that's kind of what happened to me.  One of the years in my life that I felt most existentially at sea was late 2014, right after I'd finished an Ironman Triathlon.  I'd spent the previous two years training and focusing for the event, which I then completed, and all of a sudden there was a large open void with no big goal in front of me.  What the heck would happen from there?

That's when I wrote an eight-year plan, taking me to 2022.  That plan included helping my kids grow and move out of the home, buying a new home, finding a publisher for a book I'd write and publish, as well as a couple of other professional things.  At the end, there was a three-way fork in the road that I wasn't sure about (retire, sabbatical, become a dean), and so the planning ended.   

That plan was a surprisingly accurate predictor of the future.  It took me a year longer to find the publisher than I thought, for example, but the book came out right on schedule, as did the new-to-us home and most of the other things.  I find it incredibly satisfying to be able to will my future into existence like that.

So, facing a year of sabbatical followed by retirement, I'm ready to start pulling together a new set of plans -- not year-by-year like the past one, but at least something to help me make a coherent picture of how I'd like to shape what lies ahead.  I wrote in previous post about how I dumped all sorts of fun ideas into a metaphorical "toy box".  The question remained, though, how to best pull those projects out and put them onto the right (metaphorical) shelves?

I started by trying to make spreadsheets.  For many years, my May ritual has included pulling together color-infused spreadsheets to help organize my summers.  The colored headings not only make these pages more fun to look at (yes!), but they also help me think about broad categories, which in turn help me remember things that I ought to add to the list.  

Summer Project spreadsheets from years past.
Because, yes, I love planning so much that I keep these
and refer to them again in future years.

Alas (or hooray), I had so many fun things in my "I'd like to do this someday" Toy Box that my computer monitor screen was too small for me to get a big picture.  Plus, I felt like I really wanted to stand up, to use my actual body for adding things to the list.  

So then I tried using my chalkboard.  That helped a lot because I could see the overall categories from up-close and from far back.  But I couldn't fit all the projects under each category if I wrote every single one of them in chalk, too.  Fortunately, my chalkboard is magnetic, so I pinned up a sheet of paper under each chalk-written category, and wrote ideas in pencil on each of those sheets of paper.

This worked beautifully.

Making plans for the future

I left this up for a week or two, so I could get an overall sense of the scope of ideas, and also so I could add to the lists as inspiration struck.  My husband said this reminded him of the bulletin board walls in detective shows, where they're trying to figure out who was the mastermind villain, so I added a few strings to enhance the effect.

Like a detective!

I love this.  After about two weeks, I drew pictures on the pages and colored the borders, because I needed a bit of extra fun and color, naturally.  And then I took the pages down and started planning which kinds of projects I'll do soon, and which projects I can wait on for later.  It's nice to have seven big categories of projects to focus on.  

Just to give a sense, here are the big categories and some of the projects on the pages.  You can see there's a lot of overlap between the categories.  Also, for the first category I'm still not sure of a title I can resonate with, but I think I'm getting close.   

Eco Generative (that is, nurturing my "Rubbish rescue artist" tendencies)

• Organize a neighborhood yard sale, connect with city initiatives, build in a Freecycle-posting day to my schedule
• get an induction stove, big question: replace our radiators with a heat pump??

Intellectual adventure

• Work on two big books, a bunch of math papers, look into some distinguished visiting positions and awards, visit math institutes
• longer term:  Family history (organizing & digitizing), learn how to weld

Building community

• Learn "thriller" dance, organize a block party, volunteer at church, invite people to special dinners, plan trips to see friends

Financial independence

• Make appointments with TIAA people, update beneficiaries, submit retirement paperwork, figure out medical insurance, get the Amtrak app on my phone, move savings accounts around from low-interest to higher-interest/CDs, update my CV

Home & craft projects 

• Finish my yoga mat (done!), Design bedroom reading lights, make more cow shelves, bookshelves, wash windows, design a laundry rack pulley system to bring clothes from the back patio up to the second-floor balcony

Family

• Organize special dinners, help my dad with storage units (done), make birthday cards for the year, reorganize some of the family information in my command center, build in grandchild time

Health and fitness: physical and mental

• Read books, exercise gregariously, meditation, make lunch dates with friends, pick up the banjo again

Enough with photos

Life continues to be rich and full here in Enoughsville.   There's so much going on -- for example, fun math stuff.  (One day this week, I woke up to do an early-morning zoom call with two grad students in Calcutta, India, then followed that up with a zoom call with my collaborator who is spending the year in France, and then helped a new mathematician move into our department, and then did more of my own math . . . I've had some seriously fun mathy days, I'm telling you!)

There's also so much more.  I tried to take photos to help me remember all the stuff that's going on, so here's a bit of my week in photos.  

Inkling bought tickets to the ball game last Sunday.  In the not-so-distant past, spending a whole afternoon sitting in the stands doing nothing would have made me very twitchy, because of all the work on my plate.  This trip, though, I was only mildly twitchy to get back to my math.  So, I guess my transition to sabbatical has begun!

The home team won, and we had a great time hanging out together in the stands,
moving from shade to shade as the sun kept traveling around.

From Gosling:  "We are about a mile from the 4x4 beach with the horses,
so I walked up about 2 miles and found these guys and gals."

Also from Gosling:  Apparently, it is a bad idea to squirt
yourself in the eyeball with Tide Pods.
Also bad to speed near a cop on the way home from the hospital.
Fortunately, it sounds like everyone is fine now. 

My dog keeps finding new members of the
Prewash Fan Club.

Wrestling a soccer ball away from a young fan club member.

Ten new (well, new-to-us) volleyballs,
with one pre-loved ball on the floor.
I am so grateful to our volleyball team for
tenderizing these balls for my dog,
to make it easier for her to play with them.

This is where I did a lot of my mathematics early in the week
(before the wildfire smoke moved me indoors).  
The ambient noise of being outdoors helps distract me from 
my ringing ears.

I visited my dad to help him move between
a large and a small storage unit.

I am not very good at grabbing selfies with my dad.

It's "Water Week" in my city, and I spent one morning
helping other neighbors clean up a river in our local watershed.

It's a beautiful little river!  And this year, fortunately,
there really wasn't very much trash here.  

We had a few really hazy and smoky days toward the end of the week, but then our skies cleared again.  I'm incredibly grateful for that, while simultaneously appreciating how lucky I am to be in a place where smoky days are rare.  

The young Haitian man I stay in touch with (Xavier) had surgery on his foot on Wednesday, and it sounds like the operation went smoothly and successfully; he'll have a six-month recuperation, but hopefully he'll be back on his feet again -- literally -- soon.

Nelson at work, helping customers.

Nelson got to travel to a basketball tournament this week.  When I called him, he was on the way back home, driving (actually, his friend was driving) through a rain storm in Iowa.  We could use a rain storm here, but his own rainstorm meant I didn't get to chat with him for very long.

Also, my grandchild (Bchild) turned three this week,
so I made her a three-thing, which I'll just plunk down here,
but explain a bit more next week after she gets to open it!

And that's the news from our family, which continues to be wealthy in our adventures.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous.

Adventures in Tinnitus

 The date it started

I went for a lovely run with my friends in the morning, and showered, and went to babysit my grandchildren for the day. While I was with the kids, I kept hearing a sound like a telephone bell off in the distance. Eventually, I realized I was hearing that bell only when my grandchildren or I was speaking, and that the noise was actually coming from inside my own head.  

Of course, my first instinctual reaction was that I had a deadly brain tumor. (Good news: I've had this reaction often enough that I could laugh at myself even while I was contemplating it.) Still, even while I knew I was not in dire danger, the bells in my head persisted, and my ear started to feel sorer and sorer.   So -- since my doctor's office was closed -- after I finished up with the kids and a couple of other pre-planned errands, I walked over to Urgent Care.

Urgent Care told me that I didn't have an ear infection (that was my second self-diagnosis), but rather that I had allergies. I'm not sneezing; I don't have itchy eyes; I don't notice my nose running; I've never really had allergies before.  Still, the doctor could see postnasal drip and see that my ear  drums were white in a way that indicated my eustachian tubes were all blocked up. The doctor prescribed Flonase, and said it would take three or four days for the passage to open up again.  I thanked the doc and went home to start my meds regimen. 

The first full week

The ringing in my ears--tinnitus--started in seriousness. Sometimes, especially when people with high voices were speaking, I could still hear the bells, especially in my left ear. After about four or five days I started to worry about how much to worry that it hadn't gone away like the urgent care doc said it would.  Was it a problem that the Flonase hadn't unblocked my ears in four days? Should I see a doctor about this? Is the medication expected to take longer after all, and I should just wait for it to do its work?  

I called back and forth with doctors who were remarkably unsympathetic about the ringing in my ears ("there's nothing we can do about tinnitus"), but did confirm that re-opening my eustachian tubes can take weeks (more than days).  So I decided not to worry.  

Well, deciding not to worry and actually not worrying are two different things.  The ringing in my ears is certainly anxiety provoking.  The quick internet research I did on it suggest that two things help:  one, white noise, and the other, cognitive behavioral therapy ("if you learn not to be bothered by the ringing, then it's not a problem anymore").  The last one seems rather difficult to believe, but it nonetheless gives me hope.

Over the course of this week and the week that followed, the fact that my ear still feels stopped up and sore has become another small bit of hope:  if-and-when my eustachian tubes clear, maybe this ringing will go away.  Maybe I won't have this ringing for the rest of my life.  

Amid this hope, I learn to become wary of quiet rooms.  Walking around outside, being in a room with open windows, walking past a humming microwave oven . . . all these help the ringing to subside, or even disappear.  Sometimes I think I'm cured!  And then I walk into a quiet room and it's like I'm in a pressure tank, and my head is bombarded with whining, screeching mosquitos.  Not only that, but often also, it's like I've been diving deep underwater or flying high in a plane; I can feel the pressure in my ear drum more when my ears are ringing than when I'm in a place with ambient sounds.  The ambient sounds don't so much drown the ringing out; it's rather like they cancel the ringing -- like there's a switch that turns the ringing off and on, and the microwave oven can flip that switch.

During the day, if I'm sitting at my computer, I binge stream YouTube videos that play white noise.  I'm not fond of extra noise (static, or rain, or wind), but it's so, so, so much better than the high-pitched whine that is the alternative.

Also, I try not to stay inside: I try to be outdoors where I get relief from the whine.  Sometimes, even outside, the whine returns, but it's easier to find ways around it there.  Except at some point, I really do want to sit and read the paper, or sit and work on math, and sometimes I need to be indoors, and so it's back to YouTube noise zzzshhhing back at me.  

At night, I go to bed with ears ringing.  I think about mathematics problems; I've been hooked on solving a geometry problem and about finding the best ways to explain the solution, so I force myself to think about a particular problem and, in fact, by concentrating hard enough on that I can distract myself from the ringing enough to fall asleep.  When I wake in the middle of the night, I have to do the same thing all over; it's a chore, but I'm kind of impressed that it works.  It's really, really hard to make myself think about ellipses and tangent lines and LaTeX code when instead I want to obsess over the fact that my head is at war with me and maybe I'll never live in peace and quiet ever again in my life, but making the effort, surprisingly, works.  

The second week

The bells effect seems to have gone away, but the stuffy ears and ringing in my ears is still strong. I decide to become a warrior. The longer this lasts, the more chance there is (I am figuring) that this condition will be with me chronically. I'd had very mild ringing in the ears for a while now, which I'd noticed only when I do something very quiet, like sitting down to meditate.  That was nothing like what I'm experiencing now, but perhaps it's a harbinger of what is to come. If so, I want to be prepared.

I double down, or perhaps triple down, on the trifecta of drugs (Flonase), white noise, and mental gymnastics. 

As for white noise, before this all started, when I wasn't doing something that required a brain power, I would often listen to a Pandora station I'd designed that included singers like Tracy Chapman, Alison Krauss, Etta James, and The Wailin' Jennys. But I can't concentrate on math when they're singing, so I'd turn off the music once I started reading or solving crossword puzzles or writing emails.  This week I decided to go for music with no words: websites about tinnitus say that classical music often helps, so I start a new channel.  I can do math while listening to symphonies. 

My husband gives me a pair of earbuds, because those same websites say that some tinnitus sufferers actually get hearing aids that pipe white noise into their ears for relief, and earbuds seem like a potential test of how that might work.  When the ringing overcomes the music, I add a bit of "Celestial White noise" or "rain noise" for a little while to help reset my head, and then go back to just music.  And for night time, I bite the bullet and have my husband order me a white noise machine (shudder), so I'll have the option of using it.  I don't know if it'll actually work, but I'll have the option of finding out.  

[Update: nopers.  As I'd feared, the white noise machine is the worst of both worlds,

creating an annoying noise (ugh) that doesn't mask the ringing (ugh, ugh).

So we sent it back.]

As for mental gymnastics, I add in a deliberate social component to my life, which I figure is probably good for me anyway.  I know I need social interaction to help keep anxiety at bay, and when I'm talking with other people the ringing isn't as bad, so I give myself social rules: I bop around campus, visiting various colleagues and friends, and I tell myself I must talk to X number of people before I go back to doing math.  When I meet with them, I turn my experience into a grand story:

"Want to hear one of those great ironies of life?  I've started my sabbatical, so for the first time in a long, long time, I get to do what I love most in the world: to go into a quiet room all by myself and read books and think about math!  And now I have this thing that makes being in a quiet room all by myself a minor form of torture from hell . . . "

And when my friends understandably offer sympathy and say how horrible this must be, I can point out the irony and humor, and I say that I'd think this were a funny joke if it wasn't me that is the main character.  Sharing this with friends, and laughing at myself this way helps to put things in perspective.  I'm generally healthy, and I live in a time where I *can* get advice from the web and white noise, too.  Seriously, bringing other people into my world reminds me that this is rotten, but it's not devastating.

Also, I make a doctor's appointment for about two weeks from now -- it's just about time for my annual physical, and also having something on the books ahead of me is reassuring.  (And the fact that I'd already called my doctors about this and they didn't seem to be alarmed at all says, eh, give it two weeks more before I whine at them about whether it's working).  

I don't know how to "train my brain" to ignore the ringing, but I also know that there are lots of noises in the world I pay no attention to, and maybe this weird high buzz can be one of them, if I can't somehow get it to go away by draining the pipes between my ears and nose.  One friend tells me she's had ringing in her ears for years, and by now she's learned to ignore it.  This is both terrifying and comforting.  It gives me more reason to find ways to soldier on.

The third week

I have discovered many of my friends who are highly acquainted with allergy management, who commiserate and offer advice.  Many of them take multiple meds, and based on their regimens, I add a few to my own:  in addition to Flonase, also Claritin and Sudafed.  I don't know if allergy meds will (eventually) help with the ringing, but in my head (so to speak) they're related, because my ear is still stopped up.  The first night I took Sudafed,  I slept like a log -- in fact, I overslept church a bit the next morning.  It feels a bit delicious. 

The ringing sometimes seems not so loud.  I don't know if that's wishful thinking, or if I'm just getting used to it, or what.  It's certainly not louder than before, so that's good at least.  But it's still here.  

I meet more people with tinnitus.  One man from church has had it since the start of Covid.  Another had ringing in his ears for 4 months, and then it went away.  This is yet more terrifying comfort.  Still, I'm managing okay, and I know there are worse things in the world.

To be grateful for: 

1. the internet, which connects me to advice and also gives me distracting noise.  
2. Also (and I know this isn't for everyone, but for me, this is golden): math.  Seriously, this math problem I'm playing with is a lovely distraction from the omnipresent whine/buzz that follows me around.  Plus, the math is pretty, and it feels good to bring something pretty into the world.  
3. And, of course, friends, because when I'm talking to others the combination of distraction and noise is often so powerful that I'm at peace again, which is a wonderful place to be.

Update with wheels, ellipses, and cheerio cakes

Life continues to be rich and full here in Enoughsville.  I myself continue to have back-and-forth run-ins with the ringing/hissing app that seems to be installed in my cerebellum.  I'm not sure what more to say about that -- sometimes there'll be an hour or two where it subsides so much I think, "I'm cured!", but it keeps coming back, especially at home, and so I'm doing my best to learn to deal with it, both finding physical ways to minimize the ringing, but also mental ways to redirect my attention.

And just to remind me that things could be worse . . . for poor Xavier in Haiti, things do seem to keep getting worse.  A few months ago, the armed gangs running through the streets had broken the motor bike we'd bought him.   We sent him a bit of money for food and to fix the bike.  I never know, when we send money to Haiti if it's actually going to the intended purposes, but I'm willing to be a bit wrong now and again if I end up with the chance to do more good than harm in the long run.  At any rate, it appears the bike did indeed get fixed, . . . but then earlier this week we got an update from Xavier just saying "Mom", with a bunch of person-in-head-bandage emojis.  And then when I asked what was happening, he said, "I accidented.  I made an accident."

So, the bike seems to be beyond repair.  We're hoping Xavier himself isn't beyond repair; he's in a hospital, in serious pain, and is going to have surgery on his foot next week, with hopes that he doesn't end up losing it.  This poor young man!

How to segue out of that?  The majority of my days are actually much more pleasant than those two first updates indicate.   My calendar looks strangely empty:  I have a bunch of exercise dates in the early mornings, a bit of my weekly volunteering at the local soup kitchen,  one zoom meeting with a TIAA representative, and two different evening events, but the middles of my days are big swaths of white space.

And what do I do with that white space?  I've been having a lot of fun working on a mathematics paper; it helps with my sanity as I try to fall asleep at night, and it gives me a reason to go talk to other friends on campus, and it's an excuse to come up with cool beautiful pictures.  Here's one of those pictures:

Coming up with this image involved not only figuring out some of the geometry of perspective and interactions of ellipses, but also figuring out how to code a bunch of partitions in a graphics language called Tikz.  (For those who care, it involves several \begin{scope}--\end{scope} sections that are clipped differently.)

My guy has been getting more involved in helping the folks involved in fundraising for Ukraine relief.  He was added to a text message list, and started getting all sorts of texts in Russian . . . that was funny!  (Especially because they weren't so much about strategy or Ukraine tactics as about dietary preferences "I'm a vegan, but my husband is not a vegetarian." etc.)

Prewash is enjoying the summer weather, and especially enjoying the occasional chances she gets to come into the office with me.  She's been with us for a while now; she's turning 7 sometime this summer.  We're not sure exactly when her true birthday is, so for the heck of it I declared this past June 2 to be the day we should celebrate.   And what a lovely celebration it was!  We had a dozen people over for a "No Hands Dinner".  This included several of my offspring, all my grandkids, and also a former student who had lived in our house for a while, together with his wife and 5-year-old twins.  We had a blast!

The kids made terrible faces when I told them that I'd decorated the chocolate cake with dog treats, but then I explained that  the treats we give the dog are cheerios. I'm sure it'll come as no surprise to you that eating chocolate cake with no hands is very, very, delightfully messy.  

Voila the cake!

(One grandchild, the 3-year-old, did the opposite of No Hands for her cake; she took to rubbing the cake with her fingers and then stuffing both hands in her mouth.  She reminded me of the bears in Narnia, who embarrassed the other creatures by sucking on their paws instead of looking fierce).  And Prewash loved living up to her name, by helping cheerfully with cleanup! It was a delightful evening.

And that's the latest news from our family.  May you and yours stay safe.

Ringing in the new/old ear

Life continues to be rich and full here in Enoughsville. This week, as I make my way further into my sabbatical, I'm still ringing in a new era, while still ringing in my ears (sigh). 

My ears are still a little bit stuffed up, despite taking the Flonase, and I don't know if that's the reason that I continue to have so much tinnitus, which is a little disorienting and distracting.  The doc says it might take a few weeks for my ears to unclog, and I hope hope hope that the ringing goes away with the ear clog, because man; I usually love to be in an empty, quiet room, but this week that has been exactly the worst place for my head.  Websites I've read say there's no cure, but that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy might help, as does having white noise.  I'm not sure about the first, but I've been trying a bunch of white noise apps, and they seem to help, as does spending time walking around outdoors.

Early this week I got to drive (in our old beater car, which has lots of good noise to help my poor head) down to Delaware to visit one of my childhood friends. We spent the day chatting and walking around and generally catching up, and it was very good to see her, her mom, her younger sister, and her niece.

As for the rest of the week, I've been trying to find mildly noisy--but not too noisy--places to work.  I figured out some things about math that made me really happy, and I practiced the "Thriller" dance with about a dozen friends, and I attended a bunch of events that my city has hosted, including one on human rights, and I spent a bunch of time pulling together all of my future want-to-do topics in a giant heap, and then sorting them out into appropriate piles so that I can plan for the future. It feels like May (which I always think of is not really existing) is coming to an end, and in June I'll actually really start doing things again. So maybe it's good that my ear congestion is hitting now, instead of next month. We'll see.

At any rate, that's an abbreviated version of my news, cut short so I can turn on the radio and distract myself again. Wishing you a lovely Memorial Day weekend!

Tickler / To-do / Toy Box

In the "Journey to Retiring" series:

I am incredibly fortunate to have a transition year next year -- before I officially retire -- where I'll get paid part of my salary and keep my job-related medical insurance, but not have teaching or committee obligations.  During my upcoming sabbatical (which officially starts on July 1), I'll definitely keep busy doing the mathematical research that I promised in my sabbatical application I would do, but I'll also have a bunch of unstructured time away from the deadline-driven demands that has been my norm.

All this is to say, when people have asked me, "what will you do when you retire?," I have difficulty answering.  The difficulty is not that I can't think of anything; it's that there's so much, SO much.

The months leading up to May were jam-packed with job-related stuff, and I let it pile on.  It's one of the things I appreciate about the academic calendar:  April is always a hurricane, but we know the hurricane will dissipate once the semester ends.  My friends and family in other kinds of jobs don't have the same ebb-and-flow, and when things get hectic for them, often it stays hectic or gets more so.  For me, though, I know that I get to be completely swamped by urgent tasks and ceremonies and meetings and reports and student meltdowns and such, but I'll be swamped only for so long.  I don't mind holding my breath and paddling as hard as I can, because I know I'll get to breathe in May.

At the same time, though, beyond the shores of May there are all sorts of new adventures beckoning.  In the past, I would have figured out a time and structure for each of these, and dropped it into a particular future month in my "Tickler file" (or I would have declined and deleted the idea).  But the open spaces ahead are so much more open than I've been used to, that I gave up all pretense of figuring out when-and-where these future projects should go.  Even as I submerged myself in March and April academia tasks, I also started collecting piles (literal and figurative) of "someday" projects, ideas that I might want to think about during the summer, or activities I might want to take up during my sabbatical year, or even after.  Nowadays, now that May (which is still strangely a whirlwind) is here, I'm starting to sift through these piles of projects and sort them out.

Julie Morgenstern, one of my favorite organizing gurus, writes about how terrible toy boxes are, organizationally speaking:  they make clean-up a cinch, but retrieval a nightmare.  She points out that savvy kids stop putting their favorite toys "away" in a toy box, because they know that's the surest way to lose them.  But me, I created a metaphorical "To-do Toy Box" for all of those someday projects . . . or rather, several toy boxes.

 I've got a spreadsheet of books that have been recommended to me, and also a shelf full of reading material that's just groaning with "read me!" wannabes.

Middle shelf: A pile of books and magazines to read "someday", 
plus crossword puzzles I saved for later,
and materials for the denim yoga mat I'm actually currently working on.

On my desk: a folder for blog ideas,
plus various folders with clippings of things
that at some point I decided I'd want to do in the future.

I've got a whole email folder where I've been chucking stuff to come back to later.  It's mildly selective (it's got 30 different emails in it, but not 300); even so, it's much denser than my "@to do" folder (7 emails), "# waiting for replies" (3 emails), or "#-upcoming appointments" (15).  

Underneath my CD/craft shelfs:  boxes and boxes of
family memorabilia (photos, letters, documents)
that I want to digitize, organize,
and then get the heck out of my house.

I've also got (as the photos show) piles of projects tucked away in various corners in the house.  The piles are not generally of the get-in-my-way variety, but I do hope to beat them down in the future and reclaim that space at the margins of my life.  

So that's a bit of one stage of what my journey to retirement looks like:  I've been letting these Someday Projects pile up in heaps and boxes, ignoring them while I've worked on and played with the stuff that's been right in front of me.  I'll write eventually about how I decided to sort through these piles and create order out of . . . well, if not exactly "chaos", then something more like "amassed mish-mash".