Cleanup As Christmas

Now that I am in my approximately 4,000th day of organizing, reorganizing, cleaning and tidying the barn I am qualified to declare that Cleaning is Christmas.  Unlike my friends MikeM, Ripplin’ John and MartinO I am not by temperament nor habit fastidiously organized in my physical surrounding.  This means that combined with my forgetfulness about the details of my surroundings, organizing and cleaning reveals “new” contents of the barn that in truth I had forgotten either 1) that I even had them, or 2) where I put them, sometimes in a “special place.”

My current paroxysm of tidying the joint is just such a reality.   Sometimes the revelations are mundane, such as, “Oh, that’s where I put my favorite utility knife.”  Other “discoveries” are more meaningful.  Just a few days ago at the Plane Wellness shindig I was commenting to someone there that I was running low on the shellac wax I had ordered several years ago directly from the factory in India.  I was lamenting(?) the fact that I might need to send another big pile of money there to restock if I was going to continue using and selling shellac wax for more than another few months.

So, there in the corner tucked behind one of my workbenches were two full cases of shellac wax.   Enough for two or three years of consumption.  Suddenly that was one less thing I needed to worry about.  That alone made it a good day.  The cases were so embedded in the space (I had to actually cut the boxes apart just to extricate the contents) that I clearly placed them there before I built a storage cabinet and placed the workbench in its current location and then put stuff on top of them.

Then, as I was taking inventory of my polissoirs and packaged waxes underneath the workbench I use for that purpose, I found two full cases of the 190 proof grain alcohol I use for mixing spirit varnishes.

At this point all I have to do is persuade myself that cleaning is something I need to habituate myself toward.  Yeah, good luck with that.

Now I just have to concern myself with the fact that my polissoir maker is struggling with some health problems that are disrupting his broom-making output.  Yikes.