Well, I’ve made some progress on my apartment. However, my to-do lists keep getting longer and longer, which is not usually a good thing in my life. Currently, I need to:
- Go to the laundromat
- Finish making my brother’s birthday present (I have the supplies now but I want to actually put it together).
- Organize the bedroom (which means taking all my cute baskets out of wherever they were packed and putting them neatly on my wire shelving)
- Get my doctor to refill some prescriptions, and then pick them up
- Submit a pee sample to urology
- Get everything out of my filing basket that is not a document
- File papers
- Go through OTCs that were in storage and check expiration dates
- Sort bins in “mixed items”
- Assemble auxiliary clothes drying rack
- Make a plan of steps needed to get a cat, and when I will have completed them (I am hellbent on getting a cat, for so many reasons that it could be a whole entry in itself. One is that I haven’t shared space in my home with a free-range entity for a long time, except for housemates who I was terrified of. I think this will help me to get better at accommodating others’ needs instead of being mainly focused on myself. My turtle is an excellent companion, but he is limited to his tank and thus doesn’t do annoying things like walk in my counters. A cat will help me to be able to adjust to needs of other household members more than my turtle.)
- Separate books from other projects, fix bookcase
- Hang wall art
- Go through sentimental Grandma stuff
- Assemble laundry wringer
This doesn’t even include normal day-to-day tasks like meal prep.
Now, I do have an app that has been helpful. It’s this one:
You just input your whole list, and then it gives you two items at a time and you say what you want to do first (as in the picture). Then, after you’ve done this for a while, it gives you your list in order of importance.
Which is fine. However, I’m EXHAUSTED! I’ve been pulling all-nighters again and I just want to play Sims 4 but I push myself to work all the time. It feels like if I don’t have everything done before I go back to work on the first of September, then I’ll be too busy to do it and I’ll never have a nice place to live. I think I’ve been in so many short-term living situations that it feels like I have to enjoy this while I have it, before something awful happens to take it away.
Another problem honestly is that I just need, like, STUFF that you need in order to furnish an apartment. I made a list of things that I would really need (everything from furniture to Pine Sol) and ranked everything on a scale of 1-7. Nothing was a 1 because that would have been an actual emergency, so that’s good. But there were 53 items ranked between 2-3. Which, I mean, it’s really hard to figure all that out on a ridiculously tight budget. Specifically, I have $77 every two weeks allocated for home furnishings. The government is going to help me with some of it, but I don’t know if they can do everything. This also requires what Dr. X would call being “flexible in thinking,” meaning I might not get exactly what I would like to have, but I’ll have to make it work.
Anyway, it’s basically midnight and I desperately want to sleep but I’m still waiting for my second batch of apple butter to finish cooking. I procured a Crock Pot and its flagship mission has been to convert four massive bags of apples that I was given by the food pantry into apple butter so there’s no waste. I really am enjoying this because I love cooking and haven’t been able to do it in years. Also, if I were suddenly abducted and put on the American frontier, I probably would fare better than most due to my weird backstory, and being good at preserving fruit gives me a sense of confidence. However, at the same time, it takes twelve hours per batch not including prep, but you have to stir it every so often so I haven’t been getting a lot of sleep (by which I mean any sleep). So that sucks. Fortunately I will be done after this second batch, and then all that will be left will be finding a way to freeze it. I have sandwich bags, so I could fill up a bunch of those and then put the sandwich bags into freezer bags. That way they should last, but they’ll be in manageable portions. I don’t want to buy Tupperware because 1) I have no money, and 2) the cost of the Tupperware would exceed the value of the apples and it would still be wasteful, which this whole endeavor is about preventing.
40 minutes left on the apple butter and then I can sleep!!
