Lest you think all I do and think about is running, here I will attempt to talk about something else. I do other things. I fold laundry, cook food occasionally, feed the dogs. Oh, and I read, I crochet, and I write. And nap a lot of the days. That’s all wildly monotonous, but sometimes exciting things creep in. This week the exciting news around here is that I am refinishing my secretary hutch. And when I say I am refinishing, I mean I chose the paint color and drawer handles, and then mostly sat back and watched while my friend did most of the work. She loves this stuff, and she’s a whiz at it. I did help with putting on the first coat of paint, since it would be covered up anyway with a second coat and wouldn’t matter if I messed it up. I have never been great at painting, even before I lost my vision. Now with a limited visual field and atypical color blindness, it’s akin to handing a six year old a paint brush and saying, “just do the best you can!”

Below is an early progress photo. We had started to paint the main unit and saw that it was coming apart in the middle. Which was fine, because it is actually two separate pieces held together by wooden dowels. So taking the top section off turned out to make it much easier to finish the painting.

I’m so excited to see the finished product and get it all loaded up and organized with my office items, but it will be a couple weeks before you’ll see that, since I’ll have to wait until the paint has fully dried and cured before I can put things on and in it. It’s going to be so worth the wait. I’ll be sure to post the before and after photos for y’all so you can see the transformation. It’s going to be magical, for real.

The other project I’m working on (again) is my memoir. This is still something I strongly feel a desire to finish, and I’m making some great baby steps towards that goal. Much of the process (perhaps all of it) is expected to be tedious so I’m not sweating the details and I’m taking my time. One of the things I’ve been struggling with is how to organize all my drafts and notes. A lot of the strategies I would have used in the past won’t work now, because I can’t read normal print, I can’t read on white paper, and I can’t see typical colors or highlighting. So I have had to come up with new strategies that work with my visual impairments, and that’s been frustrating. However, this week I was reminded of an app I use, Evernote, that allows me to move my notes into folders, and I can view it in high contrast and I have all the searching and sorting functionality I could want. So that’s been exciting for me. I’m taking some inspiration from the show “Hoarders”, when they take all the clutter out of the house and move everything to sorting tables before they decide what to put back in the house and where. So I’m moving and sorting my notes into “sorting tables” and feeling positive about the progress. With any luck, by the time I get my hutch back I’ll be ready to do some serious writing!

That’s all for now. I hope you all are having a great week! *Shalom*