It started one way, ended another

Someone asked me a few months ago if I was Catholic. Initially cautious about answering, the answer is yes. While I do have a hellraiser side of me that is geneticly linked through my now 80 year old father, I do have another side of me. The two sides often meet somewhere in the grey area of my personality. I have long recognized the effects and presence of Divine Intervention in my life. I have friends that do not hold the same spiritual beliefs I do. The common denominator between us is that none of us like it when other people shove their beliefs down our throats and say theirs is the best way. I surely hope one of us is right. We all respect that each of us has a different perspective and we don't judge each other based on that narrow criteria of our spiritual tenets. We do however hold very similar morals in general of common decency. The fringes of the morals differ between us even. I have found that I am a little quieter inside than I was a year ago. Some of it is from making a large change in my household, some of it is a spiritual journey I've been taking since last Spring. I've gotten some incredible amounts of personal and spiritual support from everyone around me in varying degrees. I can only hope that I have returned the favors somewhere along the way. I've started reading a book called Saints Behaving Badly by Thomas J. Craughwell. I'm not very far into the book but it seems to be an interesting read. I also have come across this interesting website with reflections on different forms of clutter, specifically tailored to the Lenten season. Day by Day Through Lent Since I also subscribe to the FLYLady emails, this set of daily reflections applies to another area of my life. I had a goal of getting my house clean for Valentine's Day. It's honestly unrealistic for me because I get overwhelmed very easily with the mess around me. I used to pull everything out of the closet or room even, and then spend the next month carefully maneuvering around the mess as I lamented my decision. Then in the meantime I would try to clean it back up but the whole "forest for the trees" experience gets in my way. So, I am going to expand the timeline of my goal to have my house cleaned up by Easter. That's 6 weeks of Lent, therefore 6 weeks of working on my mess. I have a life that calls my name all hours of the day, and I have to make sure my efforts to clean a mess don't leave a bigger mess in my own wake. I also have to ensure that I'm not just moving stuff from one place to another. I have to get rid of a bunch of stuff, period. This house has a sum total of 3 closets. One linen closet, two bedroom closets, and the poor laundry room serves as another closet/catch all. I spent my birthday in the laundry room to get it to look like what my sister calls "the back room of a chinese restaurant". After all, it is directly off the kitchen. I will not even launch the diatribe about how the males did not listen to me when they were framing out this former garage. They've admitted that they should have listened to me, well after the fact. So I have to, once again, make do with what I've got till I can get something better. It's small and laid out weird, and I was put in this house to make me purge my clutter. These cramped quarters also saved our hides from an apartment with mold in the kitchen that the maintenence and property managers tried to say wasn't there. So if you're ever in the market for an apartment, don't move to what is now called Baymeadows Village. I don't care if they've changed managers or not, that doesn't remove the fact that the buildings are so old and probably built on a marsh or swamp, and therefore bastions of trapped moisture. So to go from this well laid out, 1500 square foot apartment with closets in practically every room, to this 1100 square foot house with practically no closets (but a big yard) was a shock to my clutter hoarding ways. It's better than what it used to be, but surely doesn't look it. And sitting here yakking to you via the keys is not getting anything done. I do however have a load of laundry running in my relatively clean restaurant back room. I only meant to post this little couple sentence long entry with the link to a reflection site, and name the book I started.....apparently more was screaming to escape my brain. I now have a puddle of cranial leakage to clean up from under my chair. I really need to get the holes in my ears fixed.