I have been sucked into Apartment Therapy for the past week or so.   Teh Googs suggested that I read a thing about nifty dwellings ranging in size from “teeny tiny” (<400 sq feet, I think?) to "small" (<1000 sq feet, I'm just about certain).  AT runs an annual contest about these, so there were lots, and being who I am, I found myself compulsively looking at Every. Single. One.

While poring over AT's collection of small dwelling spaces, I kept sort of lingering over my unspoken wish for houseplants: the one that goes, "Man, it would be so nice to have some houseplants, but nothing deserves to die of despair."

Because, seriously, that is what most plants do in a house like mine, which is (in a word) dark.

AT had an answer for that, too: a whole bunch of articles about plants that not only are hard to kill, but will do all right in low-light conditions, instead of behaving as if they're living in the swamps of sorrow (ARTAAAAAAAAX!).

So it turns out that there are, quite likely, a few plants that could survive living in my house; that might even do reasonably well here.  Especially if I occasionally open the front door and let them huddle there, like prisoners in some kind of inter-kingdom internment camp, enjoying a rare opportunity to play in the sun.

Good lord, is it any wonder that plants would rather die than live here?

Anyway.  So there are a few species that are resistant both to darkness and to drought, though I'm less worried about the latter — I'm now quite good about watering the poor, bedraggled aloe that continues to cling to existence in my kitchen.  Seriously, that plant must have some seriously good genes.

I think I'm going to see about procuring some of these plants once I get done with the round of cleaning I'm working on now.

It's nice to be done with school so I can focus on getting the house back up to scratch.  I'm trying to do a room each day this week (and devil take the basement, for the time being), though it's working out more like part of two different rooms, plus whatever I do in the kitchen (the kitchen doesn't count as a room, since I'm in there all the time and I clean it as I work). 

Today I decluttered and dusted most of the dining room (there's still a bunch of stuff on the telephone table that's been there longer than I've lived here), then cleaned and scrubbed the catbox and followed by cleaning most of the glass and surfaces in the bathroom.  Except the catbox, I figured it made sense to work from the top down, which is sort of what I'm doing in each room.

The frustrating part is that it doesn't look like a house yet, to me: I actually harbor a pretty low clutter tolerance threshold, so the intermediate stages of a Big Clean can be uniquely frustrating.  However, I am able to see that it's getting better and I can see that I'm going to succeed in getting everything cleaned up, so I'm pretty content.

After that's done, I'm going to work on trying to figure out some really workable solutions to try to prevent some of the clutter that happens.  A big part of the problem is that Denis is a pack-rat and I'm easily overwhelmed by visual clutter.  Ideally, a huge piece of the solution would be to drastically reduce the amount of stuff in the house, so everything could be put away without having to move Thing A in order to Tetris in Thing B and so forth.  However, Denis is slow to part with things (though he is doing it, a little at a time), so instead I have to try to figure out how we reach a happy medium.

So that’s a project.

And so is getting plants.

Beyond that, we’re working our way towards sorting out the various crises we’ve run into.  I think Giant Crisis #2 is basically sorted, but it’s kind of a wait-and-see game.  It involves the possibility of an enormous chage to the way Denis’ client base gets access to care in Kentucky, and while the intentions behind the change are good (increasing community access while decreasing institutionalization), the current “solution” on the table is about as good at doing that as banning naps on park penches is at solving the problem of homelessness. 

Ideally, what will happen is that everyone who makes decisions about these things will figure this out and come up with a solution that both helps Denis’ clients (who are people with intellectual and developmental disabilities) gain more access to the community without putting huge roadblocks between them and the therapeutic services they need, which will also help all the professionals who provide those services to remain in business, doing what they love to do.

Okay.  So that, and cleaning, and plants.  And tomorrow I’m doing Brienne’s class and getting a haircut and, I hope, sorting the living room.  Thursday I’ll address the office; Friday I’ll do whatever’s left over and address as much of the bedroom as I can (the bedroom is the second-worst clutter zone: Denis has more clothes than we have room for, which means it is physically impossible to put all the clothes away).

So that’s it for now.  This turned out way longer than I expected.

Plants.