Beautiful weather and fall cleaning ...

Last weekend, after weeks of drought and temps in the 100’s, a cool front came through bringing a couple of days of much-needed and prayed-for steady rain (here’s how badly we needed the rain: Saturday, our first full day of rain, I went to town for a day off from “puppy duty,” to do some browsing in my favorite shops and stores, get my hair cut and pick up some groceries, and everyone was walking around without their umbrellas, dashing from car to store, from store to car and saying, “Isn’t this wonderful!” and “Isn’t this great!”)

Now the sun is out, but the cooler weather is lingering ... just heavenly! Rest assured that I am not under the delusion that we’ve seen the last of the hot weather for this year (this is Louisiana, remember) but for now we have all the windows open, there’s a cool breeze blowing the curtains around, and I’m embracing the blessing of our unusual-for-this-early-in-September fall weather!

 Now that I’m finished with the poster project I was working on, I’m deep into clearing out, sorting through, organizing and generally sprucing up my work space. This project has kind of expanded to include not only my studio, but the whole upstairs. We basically live on the first floor of this old house, and the upstairs has been serving as mostly just storage and my working area since we started fixing the house up ... until now!

In my last post I showed you some pics of my studio. Keeping in mind that with most organizing projects, things have to look worse before they get better, here are, not my "After" photos, but my “looking-worse-before-things-get-better” photos.

This is what my studio looks like now.

This is the room next to my studio, where I’m unpacking boxes that haven’t been opened since we moved in four years ago, and sorting things into four categories: Keep, Toss, Recycle, and Donate.

Toss is a really fun category, because then I get to throw something off the balcony into the big orange dumpster.

And here, out in the hall, is where I’m going through approximately one gazillion books, organizing and deciding with Paul which 12% we want to keep and which 88% we want to give away. Whew! Hey, here’s a funny thing I discovered: 12% of one gazillion is still one gazillion.

And here’s something I just noticed, too. In the four photos in this post of the inside upstairs of our house, not one has a cat in it. Amazing!