No Room in the Inn...

I spent my whole day today throwing things out, and cleaning up...

It was a bittersweet experience...

I'm also a photographer, and enjoyed the many years I made my own black & white prints. I packed up my enlarger a couple of years ago, and just this weekend, put aside all of my chemicals for disposal, developing trays will be gifted using my local freecycle, and all of the bits and pieces of my darkroom got packed up, to make room for my soap products. A large utility shelf unit was brought into the basement, and finally I have a decent place for my large mixing buckets, which were usually on my desk, or on the floor... then I took it one step further, and culled my files. Old negatives, photography product brochures (tons of them)!, photo lab info - all got recycled. It's made a considerable amount of free space in my file cabinet, but also I feel a little freer, trusting that if I need more product brochures, I'll be able to find them. I'm still taking photography jobs, but I'm scanning negatives and retouching photos on the computer, and emailing them to a lab, instead of enlarging them myself. If I get desperate to 'darkroom', perhaps Toronto Image Works still has their rental darkrooms available... I can get my 'fix' that way.

I'm a bit of a pack rat by nature - I love my stuff... my wife is the opposite - she operates very minimally, happy with less clutter... she avoids my side of the basement, except when she's out of scotch tape, or needs to use my computer... she's even challenged me to throw out my high school year books... I'm resisting, but I think it will happen inevitably...

I know how being organized is useful - when I'm ready to make a batch of soap, often my buckets are dirty (from the last batch) and I have to take them into the tub to wash them... then I go to weigh out my oils - oops, batteries in the scale are dead, but I can't get to the desk to find more, which my kids have already probably taken, and it goes on, and on, making simple tasks frustrating...

We'll see this this next batch of soap goes, I'm halfway there to making new molds - I'm using 3" ABS pipe, cut into 12" lengths, and then cut in half, to make half-round soaps... it's a new soap idea, having yet only a rich life in my head - it's time to make it happen.