I'm finally chipping away at the stuff I wanted to get done over the weekend. Jonah and I got through his toy box downstairs and quite a bit of his room yesterday. Jonah was somewhat resistant and was onto me as soon as I pulled out two boxes and started throwing stuff in them. He walks up and says, "are those toys to take to Goodwill?" Then starts saying, "no! I want to keep that one." He protested even after I presented the prospect of having new toys by the end of the weekend to replace them or if I said something was broken (and broken might mean has dead batteries). I never should have let him watch Toy Story. Eventually he got sidetracked enough with playing fireman that he left the fate of his toys in my hands.

I still need to go through his closet and all of the non-clothing drawers. We're about to get him a new bed and the changing table where we stored toys isn't going to be there anymore. I'm trying to prepare for not only the new toys he's about to get, but also the rearranging of his room once we get the bed.

I'd love to set up stations in his room like they do at school (i.e. all his Lego in one spot, all his Hot Wheels in one spot, all his dress up/pretend stuff in one spot, etc.). The idea is you play with and store the stuff in one area so theoretically things don't get strewn everywhere. Theoretically. He seemed interested yesterday in wanting a place to hang up his fireman hat and jacket "just like a real fire station" and I know he helps put things away at school. So as long as I have labels and he knows where things go, he might participate in cleaning up with a little prodding.

Anyway, It felt good to get a huge chunk of that done, even if I didn't get some of the other cleaning and errands done I wanted to yesterday. Now I want to do it to the rest of the house! This might just be the beginning of me getting pulled out of my funk. Organizing usually helps. I love to organize! I'm a freak like that. I've designated a journal sized spiral notebook to decluttering/organizing. Jonah and I sat down and made a list of containers and storage he would require for his various categories of toys. His Hot Wheels and Lego have outgrown their containers and his Star Wars figures appear to require their own small box now as well.

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Of the happy, apart from feeling really accomplished in Jonah's part of the house:

Jonah and I made dark chocolate peppermint bark yesterday morning. That was a lot of fun and very tasty! Jonah loved smashing the candy canes the best, I think.

I found Giraffie! Jonah's cuddle toy that he sleeps with every night has been missing for a couple of weeks, but I discovered him stuffed under a chair cushion in the living room. He's handled it pretty well, except for one day on the way to school he had a little bit of a breakdown. There weren't big tears, but I could tell he wasn't just whining and was really missing his little friend. I diverted him with the notion that he was only going for a half day and wouldn't have rest time and therefore wouldn't have been taking Giraffie to school anyway. If you could have seen the way this little boy was literally bouncing around when I pulled that little blanket/stuffed animal hybrid out of the chair. He was the very picture of giddiness. I think he hugged him as tightly as he possibly could. It was very sweet.

I installed Swype on my phone and it is FREAKIN' AWESOME! If you have an Android phone and don't already have it, I highly, HIGHLY recommend installing the beta that's available right now! I'm sure it will be even better as I get more comfortable with the keyboard layout (it's slightly different than the one I was used to, in terms of where numbers and punctuation keys are).

In the past two nights, we've seen Robot Chicken Star Wars III and It's A Trap! (Family Guy Return of the Jedi). Both are fantastic! But I think Robot Chicken was a better effort, no matter how much Seth MacFarlane likes to dog on Seth Green in his episodes (which is a funny gag, don't get me wrong, and even better was when all the other voice actors turned it around on him). I could have done without about 2 minutes worth of the nodding scene. I totally realize that going beyond the time limit of the joke was part of the gag. I just find those sort of annoying and lazy, like the 5 minutes of Conway Twitty in the middle of a 20 minute episode or Peter skinning his knee. Thankfully, after sitting through 5 minutes of nodding, the Darth Twitty gag was blessedly short.

And of ultimate happy, I read the new Hyperbole and a Half.

Friday night we tried the new Nuvo Burrito in East Nashville. It was. . . meh. Not bad, but I won't be rushing back there. Not while Baja is in town! Their guacamole was good, but tasted a lot like ours with less [or no] lime and pureed into a uniform, albeit thick, consistency instead of leaving it chunky, like we do (which I prefer).

gondoriangirl has been generously offering to share her employee discount at World Market for a while now. Saturday, after balancing our budget and discussing it at length, we decided to take her up on it and bought two new leather armchairs and a matching love seat for the living room. She was even gracious enough to bring the two chairs over after work, since all three pieces wouldn't fit in our collective cars.

Sunday, I listed our fugly old couch on Craigslist for free and a couple of very appreciative college students came to pick it up that afternoon.

Monday, Chris took the day off. The new component cabinet that Chris ordered at the same time as the parts for his new Hackintosh arrived and we assembled that with little difficulty, but much time. arymetore & witchcat07 had invited us to the zoo with her brother and sis-in-law and their kiddos. Although the kids didn't interact much, I think they all had a great time. As for me, I'm always entertained by the zoo. I noted that the playground area, which we hadn't spent much time in until now, really would be a great place to take some pirate costume pictures, especially if someone had a tribal Jack Sparrow costume. Too bad Chris won't let me make him one.

After we left the zoo, Chris Jonah and I headed to La Hacienda (as seems to be a zoo tradition) for an early dinner of some cool, refreshing ceviche and tacos (well, I had a torta). On our way home, Jonah passed out in the car. Once we got home, he was a little fussy but settled in eventually to watch a movie. I wrestled with him for about an hour to keep him out of Chris' hair while he got some things done. After that, I felt absolutely exhausted between that and being out in the sun and humidity at the zoo all afternoon. So, I proceeded to do nothing for the rest of the night while Chris picked up the pile of packing materials we had accumulated over the weekend.

Yesterday, I spent a fair amount of time breaking down said packing materials so that I can take them out to a recycling receptacle besides ours (since there's quite a large stack of large pieces of cardboard from the furniture and two full kitchen trash bags full of styrofoam). Then just generally got the house back into shape. I'm pretty sure I've eradicated all little bits of styrofoam from the bottom floor of the house.

( And in other news. . . )

The cleaning part is done in the office and everything is sorted into related piles (stack of electronics, stack of my hobby stuff, stack of files and important office related stuff, etc.) The goal today is to go through and declutter each stack and then put it away in an organized fashion. As I go, I plan to make notes on things that would make keeping the office organized a lot easier and make the space more workable (things like more shelves in the closet and some shelves above the desk, and maybe a desk with a smaller footprint and various things like that). I've done this before, but it seems every time I get in here to work, I think of a different way to go about it. We just want so much functionality out of this room, it's hard to get it all to mesh. It's my work area, Chris' electronics storage area, our guest room and Chris even wants to mount a moderately sized flat screen on the wall to be able to watch TV in here if he wants while I'm working (as though the ones in the bedroom and the living room aren't enough).

But anyway, as I'm starting to see things shaping up in my work space, I'm looking at the Angel gown and feeling no strong pull to work on it. I pulled out the embroidery the other day and started working on it some more, but I didn't get very far before bed and I've not felt like picking it up again. I've been more inclined to read at night when I've set aside time to work on it. I'm not in complete avoidance mode just yet, but I'm just not feeling terribly enthusiastic about working on it and that makes it very hard to get anything done.

I probably need to watch Fellowship and get all hyped about again. I'm also about to buy a new Arwen wig, which might get me excited about it again. I'm starting to think of things that will help me better get into character as well. But, if after these small efforts I'm still not excited, well, I'm probably going to shelve the project for a while and maybe start working on Maleficent. I don't want to push anything. After all, this is a hobby that I'm supposed to enjoy, not force myself to finish something I don't feel like working on. If I had the budget, I'd throw together that Hermione costume instead. Still looking for an excuse to buy some Golas. ;)