no point crying over skimmed milk

I was making slow progress last year. But then my housemate was injured, and needed to use a walker for a while. Clearing space for the walker basically boxed in everything that she didn't need to access, including all my work in progress. I couldn't - and still can't - even close the door to my home office.

She's now almost completely recovered. The walker has been retired, and so has the cane that came after it. Last week I made a very small inroad into the surface mess in my office. I'd planned to work on that daily, but life happened. Until today.

Tonight I wanted to read a book. My book reading chair was well positioned for light in the morning, but not at all good when it's dark outside - artificial light sources near it are inadequate. So I kind of lost it, and attacked the mess.

Things that got moved to my bedroom from e.g. the living room to make space for the walker have been consolidated or removed. The reading chair is in there, with a pair of plastic storage bins stacked as a coffee table beside it. A largish number of unread media have been evicted with extreme prejudice. The matching chair that was full of objects moved from the housemate's bedroom has been unburied, and moved to where the usable chair had been, still containing the smaller objects that had been in/on it. I asked the housemate to clean them up eventually - no hurry - and she promptly shoved them into plastic storage boxes and carried them off.

There's more still to do - e.g. backfilling the place the second chair was with stuff from a heap on top of a rocking chair, or perhaps moving the whole heap there, chair and all. And I'm not entirely satisfied with the new location of my laundry hamper. But I can read comfortably in the late evenings, without sitting at the dining room table in a less comfy chair.

I'm physically tired, and I imagine my back will be screaming at me tomorrow. I've doubtless inhaled enough dust to give a susceptible person an asthma attack. But both my bedroom and the living room feel somewhat less like warehouses, particularly my bedroom. (I feel like it's all mine again at last, even though essentially all the junk that was blocking it up was mine rather than ours.) Phew!