13 Sept 2016 — Starting on the Garage

I often have trouble with my sleeping pattern. It’s improving slowly, but right now it’s a bit all over the place.
Having not got much sleep over the last few days, and only nodding off at about 9 this morning. Four and half hours later, I wasn’t expecting to do much until I woke up properly through sometime later in the afternoon. Having sat at the computer for a couple of minutes though, I heard a low rumble from outside, and decided to unplug everything while the forecast thundery weather passed.

So what do you do with yourself when you’ve turned the computer off?
You venture into the garage and stand there for a while trying to figure out where to start.

I moved a few bits around and stacked things a bit higher to make more floor space to work in, but the real answer was fairly obvious. Transporting things can be very awkward. ‘things’ are rarely of a uniform shape. So I’ve tended to keep hold of a lot of boxes. Much easier to pack a bunch of boxes into a car/van, than an assortment of random shapes with sticky out bits, cables, breakable parts, and other alternative features that seem almost designed to make them require individual transportation.
Whatever. Flattening the biggest of the boxes was what needed to be done.

And some of them were pretty big.
Mainly the ones which my sim-racing rig had been delivered in. One was over six foot long once flat!
It’s amazing how much more space there can be in a garage when four or five large boxes get packed away.

I didn’t do much more than that though, as tiredness caught up with me fairly quickly.
Some items to go in the ‘electricals’ area were moved from the garage to my room, and I had a look in a couple of boxes which turned out to be full of kitchen stuff. What’s in them can be reduced by a fair amount, and then put in the loft for whenever I move and need my own cooking stuff again.

Saying thank you. An odd thing to do to items, but it’s part of the KonMari system.
During my garage foray today I found my Head bag. I’m not sure which year of school I got it, but it was a replacement for an Adidas bag that completely fell apart. Four or five years of school use though I’d imagine. Later it was used in my Firecharmers days for all may cables and other gigging bits. Might even have carried on into the ManBREAK period. After that it became the store for all of my audio cables that weren’t in use.
The finish has started to come off now, so it’d be a pain to use it, but it could still act as a store.
I’m aiming to have far less stuff to store though, so a raggedy ass bag that would be needed as the x-teenth resort isn’t worth keeping.
Thank you for the 30 years bag.

A really frustrating thing about having a low energy reserve is that this de-cluttering needs it all. I started streaming on twitch.tv recently, which has been a lot of fun, but has had to be put on hold while to be able to do this de-clutter. One of the games I play is Rocksmith, which uses a real guitar/bass as your game controller. I haven’t played much in recent years, so it was all a bit rusty, but I soon got into the bass again. I used to use a couple of sweatbands so I wouldn’t rub my strumming wrist raw on the body. That was starting to happen again, so I dug them out. They’d finally lost their ability to grip though, so were useless and have been replaced. Same with an elasticated guitar strap.
Thank you old sweat bands and strap.

This feels like a ramble now.
I’ll try again tomorrow.