Hampered

A pic of my old cane last April before I taped its sections together

Today has been long and exhausting. It was my first trip back to the library since I got home and thus the first in a month. I've been keeping my husband's hours ever since I got back so I was awake before five this morning. I was all set to leave for the library by twenty to ten. All set that is except I couldn't find my white cane. My Mom had traded me for one that folds up as mine had had to have its sections taped together when the elastic inside the tubes died. (See pic above.) After it was taped together I kept it on the front porch. Now I've got to get used to having a folding one again. It is small enough to slip into a medium sized purse or lose in the couch cushions. I'm pretty sure I tossed it on the bed with the rest of the things I was carrying in from the car after Xmas shopping yesterday. That is why I spent over an hour pulling blankets and pillows off the bed and pulling the mattress away from the wall and getting down on the floor with a flashlight to shine under the bed. It finally turned up in the pilot's case we use as a hamper.

Meanwhile I had worked up such a sweat looking for it my hair was soaked. I made the twenty-five minute walk with a full backpack on my back because both my rolling book bags were too hard to get to. The folding one was still packed in the big box I'd packed at my Mom's in an attempt to consolidate several smaller bags into one for checking when I thought I was taking the bus home. The rolling backpack took on new duties after the libraries closed last April. It became the storage for my purses and was up in the cupboard. Pulling it down meant pulling down several other things that would fall out if the backpack were not wedging them in.

So I used a regular backpack. I had a fleeting thought as to what I thought I was doing planning to bring back a pack full of books when I had not finished unpacking from my trip primarily because this room is already overflowing with stuff and the combination of the neglect during NaNo, plus the mess I'd made when packing for the trip, plus the mess Ed made while I was gone and his hours expanded to over ten per day, plus the mess we'd made with the Xmas shopping packaging and gift wrapping this weekend, had made it extra hard to find places to put things.

As if it wasn't bad enough to bring home a backpack full of library books, I chose this trip to the library to check out the new second hand book store I keep passing on the walk and bought several more!! I spent over an hour in that store while wearing the already full backpack. It was after three when I got home and as some kind of penance or something I made myself unpack the big box before I unpacked the books. I had to get that box out of the living room today as the Christmas company is coming tomorrow.

It was five before I had the box and the backpack unpacked and their contents distributed. I can't really claim it was all put away. Too many things have lost their usual homes because other items gravitated into them. I have a huge chore ahead of me in getting this room put back in order. And to think that by this time tomorrow I will have even more stuff to find places for.

This issue has been on my mind all month because as much as I want to make excuses that it is because we are living in a single room that was half full of someone else's belongings before we moved into it, I have just witnessed how easy it is to turn a thirteen room house into a collection of clones of this room. I have inherited a hoarding issue from my Mom. I have spoken about it here before. It is an issue I need to work on before I have my own home again.

Just think how many pages I could have read during that hour I spent looking for my cane this morning. That kind of waste of time and energy is repeated several times per day though it is usually just seconds or minutes not whole hours lost to the chaos. Still it doesn't take long for seconds to add up to hours.