Organizing the office

I’m thinking I don’t even have to narrate this post. These pictures speak for themselves.

I called this post “organizing the office”, but in reality, I’m still unpacking. STILL UNPACKING!!!

When Monica was here in September she helped me buy a few more pieces of furniture to store stuff. Here’s my new bookshelf.

And here’s the books!

Perfect fit, right? Just a touch of room on the bottom shelf for the few books we have stacked on the nightstands. Right? Wrong. I discovered three more boxes of books after I had filled the bookshelf! Now what?

So I moved all the travel books to a cabinet in the guest room. Yeah, those are ALL travel books. We are optimists.

While I was at it, I decided to put all the maps in the guest room too. Now when you’re staying at our house you can dream about everywhere else you’d rather be!

So here’s the deal with all the maps and travel books. In a marriage, each person usually has a moderating effect on the other – you can’t go off the deep end because your spouse is like, “Uh? Do you really need another map?” Except for the cases when you and your spouse have the same weaknesses. Then you’re just screwed.

I’m hesitant to confess we also own all these CD’s. Actually I think these are all mine and John’s are still in a box somewhere.

We’re old, what can I say? Old, and determined to be organized.

Don’t give me a hard time about how many Santana CD’s I have! I live in New Mexico, Ok? Santana is like a god here. Actually, I had all those CD’s before I even moved to New Mexico. It’s my brother’s fault. A lot of my music is my brother’s fault. Santana is the least of it 😉

Here’s the CD cabinet hiding behind a bougainvillea bush in John’s study. (Which he calls the dog room, because that’s where the doggie door is, and the dogs sleep there at night. But I keep telling him, it’s not the dog’s room!)

That bougainvillea only looks so great at the moment because we just pulled it inside for the winter. By the end of the winter it will be suffering. Bougainvillea don’t make very good house plants. John and I have a dream of living where the bougainvillea can grow naturally outside all year around.

Fun fact from a long time ago: we wanted bougainvillea for our backyard wedding, but suddenly in early August it quit blooming for some unknown reason, so we scrambled at the last minute, and added silk flowers to our potted bougainvillea so it would look like it was blooming.

Here are photos of the bougainvillea we bought for our wedding, when it still had flowers that summer:

Here’s our bougainvillea on either side of us on our wedding day, with silk flowers added because it was refusing to bloom in August:

Here’s my beautiful bridesmaids with fake bougainvillea flowers in the background. Their bouquets are real though, lol.

That was a total digression down memory lane. Now, many years later, it seems like all we do is deal with too much stuff…

Here is John at the storage unit this weekend. We’re taking a big load from the garage to the storage unit, and then we took another big load from the storage unit back to the house. It’s musical chairs with the stuff.

Unfortunately when I got up the next morning, I realized that I left a couple of Halloween decorations out of the bin that just went to storage. Now what? Do I get in the car and drive to the storage unit just to put a Dio de los Muertos mask in the right bin? Maybe I can incorporate that mask into my everyday decor. Year-round Dio de los Muertos.

Plus, I now realize that I want a piece of artwork that just went to storage.

Meanwhile, am I finally now done unpacking the office? No, unfortunately not. The books are unpacked, and I’ve got a file system started. But I still have lots of office supplies that are jumbled in various drawers, including some in boxes and bins still in the garage. It’s ongoing.

Beautiful picture, hu?!?