I'll just take a tiny little break and post something

Chris just left to pick up an old man from church from the bus depot. As a result of a complicated mix of circumstances, we have an elderly man staying in our spare room tonight and then we're taking him to church. I have supper in the oven already (meatloaf), but there's still a bunch of cleaning to do before our house is old-man-ready .

We've also been spending the weekend reorganising the storage spaces, thanks to the fact that Chris took heaps of teaching resources out of our apartment and now we aren't nearly as tightly-packed as before. We're pulling boxes out from those back corners, where they've sat since we moved in two years ago. Anything that was touching the floor has been sorted through since the flood, but the spare room was untouched by the flood, as were the upper shelves of our bedroom closet. It makes my OCD-tinged heart sing to watch our spare bedroom closet become an orderly place. All those boxes and books in rows. Everything in its place. (The next step will be to find matching baskets to line up on the shelves of our long linen closet, so that everything doesn't feel so jumbled in there. It'll be a while before we tackle that task, but I'm far too excited.*)

I found my childhood journals, during that big reorganisation. I haven't touched them since I packed them to move to Victoria. They were in this big tub that I had taped shut, labelled "Memory Box," and then shoved into a back corner of our closet. But now I guess I'm ready to face myself and do some sorting through of my brain, for the first time since we moved here. I also found that I was finally ready to read my first journal, written between the ages of 14 and 15. I have avoided that book since my later teens, embarrassed by the flowery prose and the italics. Even now, I had only expected that the book would just be good for a laugh at the expense of my teenaged self. But then I started reading between the lines and found that this insight into my fourteen-year-old self was useful for understanding myself now. Even that self that would not write directly about the more serious things going on in my brain and in my life, or would jump away from the serious stuff and retreat right into escapism, especially around the time when Dad went into the hospital for the first time. I'm starting to understand my avoidance tendencies and my procrastination. I'm also starting to accept myself for who I am.

And that's a fantastic thing.

* Chris is confused by the fact that I can completely fail to notice dirty dishes and clutter on the floor, but glory in the painstaking organisation of my bookcase, and idealise about perfecting our closets. I don't pretend to make sense.