The backs for some necklace rolls waiting for me to choose their linings.

Neel asked me this morning if it felt like a burden to post on the blog everyday. No, not really, not yet. Mostly it still feels like an exciting daily challenge, and while I imagine that I'll have periods of feeling burned out and wiped out, they haven't happened yet. Today is different. All that's wrong with today is that I'm cranky and muddled and not sure I should subject anyone to this particular mood. And yet here we are. Sorry.

I feel scattered and restless and well, grumpy is really the only word for it. Not enough time on my own to recharge my batteries and a million and ten things I want to do. And why is it that here I am, working to reduce the clutter and excess in my life, but I need more and more things to accomplish that reduction. Baffling.

Take this cheap Target bookcase for example. It's in my dining room right now, holding cookbooks, some of the pitchers I've collected and Buddha. I don't like that it's a cheap Target bookcase, the pitchers are hard to see and the cookbooks are hard to get to. I end up stashing my favorite ones, the ones I keep going back to, next to the island in my kitchen.

So, breezily I decide that we need to get rid of the book case. (Had I mentioned that yet Neel?) Bye-bye cheap Target bookcase. Here's the problem. I need the cookbooks and I want the pitchers and the cut-glass Turkey that was my grandmother's and the vase my Dad gave me and Buddha. (And really here's where we get to the main crux of my eternal dilemma. I want to minimize my life, but I love my things. Bummer.) Actually, I think I mostly have this one solved. Not the eternal dilemma, just the bookcase dilemma. Read on...

Here is my "pantry." It's actually fairly close to an ideal pantry for me which would be long and narrow and have shelves that were only one can deep so I would never again end up with four cans of garbanzo beans. It's a hallway attached to the kitchen that has two sets of stainless steel shelves for all of our food. (I know, I know, I could stand to do some minimizing here as well.) You can see that there's tons of wasted space up near the top, and for a long time I've been wanting to put a shelf along the top for some of our appliances. Not appliances like the refrigerator. Appliances like the Cuisinart. It'll be a long shelf, so I'm thinking that the cookbooks could go here too. Definitely more accessible, and that takes care of three shelves in the cheap Target bookcase.

So what to do with the pitchers, the vase, the turkey and Buddha. Well they need to be somewhere...I could scatter them throughout the house. Still, I'd really like to do some more work on the bluerairoom, and I'd love to surround myself with some of my favorite pitchers, turkeys and Buddhas up there where I work. What do I need for that to happen?

More shelves. I'd like the whole wall behind the sewing machine to be shelved. I'd use it for storage, for sure, but what a great place for some of my favorite things. I went to Lowes and bought some brackets and looked briefly at their pre-cut laminate shelving. I want color, so I want to paint these (both the pantry and the studio shelves) instead of going the easy laminate way out. I just want it now. I want Neel to come home from work and help me measure and then go to Lowes with me to have the boards cut and come home and put in the brackets while I paint and then help me put them up. Now. (Hi honey! Hope you're having a good day!)

While I was at Lowes, I got some numbers for our house that I want to put on NOW. I got gel stain to stain my bed that I want to take apart and prep NOW, and I got an extra hose that I don't really care when it gets attached to my outdoor shower.

A restless muddled midden. That's what this is.