What a day!
I’m sure I’m not the only one in the world who had a long day, but I’m going to talk about my day anyway because that’s what I do.
Let’s talk a bit about spring cleaning. Growing up, spring cleaning was the one day my parents banned our morning cartoon-watching routine to clean as much as we could in our two-bedroom apartment. As much as I didn’t want to clean in the beginning, and the fact that I’d be missing an episode of XMen and online or streaming did not exist, I enjoyed it.
You’ve got be kidding?! ‘Cleaning’ and ‘enjoy’ in the same sentence? You’re crazy.
Okay, maybe enjoy is too strong of a word. I didn’t hate it. And I maybe even had a little fun. I mean, my mom would turn up the radio I didn’t think it too bad listening to some music while doing a top to bottom cleaning. Things could always be worse right? Like, say, doing this every day. I mean, we’d wash the living room curtains and vacuum under the couch. Those are things we didn’t do very often, but on spring cleaning day … yep. We’d at least try.
So, I guess it’s because of this I don’t really mind cleaning. And while I may not be very good at it, to some people, there’s something … zen about cleaning. And maybe I couldn’t say I enjoyed it back that, but I kind of do now.
And that’s what I was doing for most of my working day. Cleaning out the office. Or, in this case, cleaning out the “storage” room.
Storage is in quotation marks because I don’t think it was really meant to be a storage room. It became that way over the years and well … my story begins.
In honor of National Library Week (which, by the way, I’m late to the party in mentioning, but I will soon), we get to host certain programs at our library. Since I’m new to coordinating programs, I decided to pick one that had no requests i.e. audio-visual equipment. I didn’t know if we had any AV equipment or anything similar so I chose one that said “Requirements: None.” Some had “Requirements: at least 10 people and small table” or “Requirements: glue, paper, scissors” and so “None” was what I was going for.
Well, what started off as “an informational program about music with so-and-so musician” turned into “musician and two friends” which then turned into “musician and two friends who will perform.” I got nervous when one became three and can you imagine how much more that grew when three became three plus three instruments? Soon, the small space the previous branch manager used to host programs in didn’t feel like it could accommodate them. Which lead me to giving that “storage” room a hard look.
TheIt’s not like it was packed floor to ceiling with stuff, but there was enough things in there to get me worried. But, I want to be able to use this room in the future so I figured now is a good time to start. So I started to clean. And clean. And … well, clean. It was tough. And tricky. And there was sneezing; thankfully, not as much as it could have been.
And then there was progress!
Yep. You read right. I was able to break down enough things and tossed out enough things to start to feel confident that this may actually work. There’s still some stuff I have to go through, but it doesn’t seem as dating any more.
So, here’s to Spring Cleaning and the lessons its taught!