Out of commission

Doing the furniture shuffle can be downright dangerous. That´s what DH found out the real hard way. Two days after rearranging our furniture, he got pain in his left shoulder so bad he fainted in the living room. As that kind of pain might also have meant a cardiac event, I called a doctor. We then spent the greater part of the night at the emergency room, him getting examined and treated and me sitting in a draughty waiting room awaiting news about what was up. Luckily, it wasn´t anything to do with his heart, so he could come home with me. Turned out he had an inflammation of his shoulder joint and may need to be operated on in the future. 

As if that weren´t bad enough, I caught a serious cold that kept me awake for about two weeks every night coughing. It got bad enough for me to spend part of each night sitting in my new easy chair trying to find at least some sleep in the upright position. 

Of course, that cold meant I could not drive to see MIL, as I didn´t want to pass it on to her.

So DH had to drive there on his own (luckily his shoulder wasn´t  hurting as badly any more), and I thought I had several days´ time to recuperate. I had intended to catch up on the work that had been backing up because I was so fricking tired over the weekend, but decided to go in on Monday (which I had intended to take off work) instead. And, just in time (argh) I lost a dental filling which meant that the second day off I had counted on was spent at the dentist´s. Who replaced the filling, but now I keep getting little electrical shocks from the new filling acting like a little battery combined with what I already had in my mouth. 

At least the cold seems to be abating. Keeping my mouth open long enough to get that filling in would have been impossible last week. And I have been able to sleep through the last nights, mostly. I still am coughing a bit, but no comparison to what I had. 

And being caught up with work again is a good feeling. 

Weight-wise, I have been paying the price for two weeks on less than three hours of sleep a night in the guise of a two-pound gain that is, right now, slowly coming off. 

I wonder if that cold was so tenacious because my body was taking the occasion of getting rid of some of the poisons I must have inhaled in my old office, too. I have never had a cold that stuck on for well over two weeks before, and apart the indoor pollution problem at the office I don´t think there was anything that would have reduced my immune defenses like that. 

The expert for indoor pollution was in last Tuesday, by the way. He took a shelf out of my office furniture for further testing. Somehow I am not convinced that smell was just the furniture gassing out. After all, I had no problems before the high humidity after the flooding last year. But I have been promised a copy of the expert´s report. 

The decluttering project, of course, has come to a screeching halt. Still, I have noticed feeling calmer in my living room with the new arrangement. The only hitch is that we will have to develop new habits when it comes to bringing mail or other stuff home.I still catch myself wanting to drop the mail on the living room table behind the door- which isn´t there any more and which is also not intended to be the drop-all any more. Having less surface to drop things on forces me to think about where things go at once. I haven´t yet developed a functioning system for that. 

And, before we can finally move our sleeping quarters into what used to be DH´s den/the guestroom, we will have to repaint the walls there. In the living room, too, because now that this room is optically calmer the sad state of the walls is that much more noticeable. But having more free space in the rooms also means that repainting them won´t be the giant horror project it used to be any more. 

Which means that I am eagerly waiting for warmer weather so I can go about painting the walls while keeping the windows wide open to air out any fumes. The experience I had at the office taught me quite a bit about what those may do. For the ceilings, I will have to enlist DH as soon as his shoulder is back to normal. 

As for the books I removed- I had budgeted to replace them all with their respective e-book counterparts. But when I had to decide which ones to buy as e-books, I discovered that I didn´t even want to replace most of them any more. I had read them once, and kept them just in case I should want to read them again. And now I realize that that would be a highly improbable event. So what were these books doing taking up space in my life any more?

Perhaps I will even go for another round at the leftover pocket books. Keeping them just for the sake of having them around is not a good use of the valuable closet space in our living room. 

As it is, there are five shelves´ worth of hardcover editions that are temporarily shelved in the guestroom which I still have to cull and then transfer to the living room. The open shelving there happens to be filled with my cookbooks and some self-help stuff that may, if kept at all, as well be kept somewhere less obvious. So, I will have to do some decluttering there, too. 

But- with every bit of clutter I remove the goal of having only things I like or use gets a bit closer. 

And with every knicknack I remove it gets easier to keep the place reasonably clean and dust-free. 

More isn´t better. Most of the time, it´s worse. Unless it´s more space, more time, and more peace. 

Julia