With Spring comes cleaning, or in some places it does. I'm starting to get more desire/motivation to clean up the Big Broken Box™, at least to an extent. There are a handful of projects on the horizon that need both space to work and relatively clean space to have people over, and to put on film (or the digital equivalent).

Tonight I think will start with the main basement room. There is method to the madness, in that the main room is likely to be part of facade central for parts of the assembly at least, and the main room adjoins the Mad Scientist Laboratory, which follows with a close second.

Getting these two rooms cleaned out and workbenches in place will mean I can move a lot of the living room stuff back to the place where it should be and have an actual workspace for projects that require messy goo and chemicals that "normal" people probably don't want to be around.

It does mean some humping of stuff that's gonna get tossed to the curb. And by humping, I mean carrying of lots of heavy stuff, not the grinding of the groin kind of humping. That's for after the house is clean.

Part of this is because I want to rearrange the living room. I need to assess some damage that was done to the wall by the chimney from water leakage before the new roof was in place. It's bad enough that I may need to replaster part of it, and if that's the case I want to look at redoing the entire chimney wall with the stone veneer.

Part of it also ties in with the porch, because I need to clear out the porch space to get back to work on the interior, and a lot of what's out there now needs to live in the basement-- like the concrete admixtures and the stone molds, and a lot of the tools.

There's a core thing from whence all of this comes, and that's me trying to find happiness with myself. It's a tall order, as I was instilled with the values of never being happy with anything you do because you could always do better-- fucking father issues-- and there's a whole lotta reprogramming that has to happen to make me even want to try, or to finish the stuff that I've started. I've been working on that crap for a long time, and I've made some progress, but there's a need for pretty constant vigilance because backsliding is really easy to do.

Over the past few years, pretty much since the dissolution of the critter and I, I've been working to deconstruct myself, tear down impediments to things that I find holding me back. And I've found a whole bunch of them in the process, things that I can blame on others all I want but that only I can take ownership of and try to fix.

It's a very introverted process. It takes a lot of navel-gazing. And there's a big part of me that wants to stay hidden until I'm fixed and polished and ready for prime-time. And I know that can't happen, because part of fixing me is being more social.

So I have to be able to let people accept my flaws. I have to be able to risk people not accepting my flaws. I have to risk ridicule and scorn.

Yeah, don't we all?

But my issues are special. They're mine, and I'm a special little snowflake.

Okay, that's only a little facetious. My terminal responsibility is to me, and fixing the stuff that is within my control. And there is a lot of behavioral stuff that I can work on, as long as I recognize it.

Now there is some behavioral stuff that I'm pretty sure I don't recognize, or may be misinterpreting/misrepresenting to myself.