Cleaning out ye olde closet

I came home from an outing Sunday and was faced with the realization that my kitchen is covered in laundry. The laundry cabinet shares the same wall as my pantry, and I fold my clothes at the kitchen table, throw them in baskets and cart them off to my room. For work I have a slew of collared button downs that need ironing and so they get pulled out of the dryer lickity split and placed on the back of a chair. I tell myself that if they are in the same room as the ironing board then I'll actually iron them - a sloppy lie. My cotton polos wrinkle easily and so they get folded over a different chair. When I'm washing my laundry I generally like to do some other chore - or watch television - which tends to distract me as I have a limited attention span. So my kitchen generally gets overrun with a couple half full baskets of clean laundry around the table with a few piles of t-shirts, undies, and socks that have been rifled through on my way out the door to work.

For some reason this Sunday I decided that I didn't want to look at it first thing when I walked in the door any longer so I got to putting things away. Of course, it's not as simple as all that. I'm in between looks at the moment. Not uber butch, but that strappy evening dress just doesn't seem right anymore. As a result I've been buying a lot of clothes but holding on to the old ones. This leads to an input/output issue. I'm not tossing out all the dresses, but I have some outmoded shirts and trousers that need to go. And do I really need that bride's maid dress now three sizes too big for the wedding of the couple I wasn't really that close to? I've trimmed down what's in the closet to make room for what should be in the closet.

Before I completed the closet re-org project I moved on to the garage. I have a tendency to hop around, and the garage has been in my sites for some time. I finally threw out a pair of heavy, chrome, metal frame dark brown fabric armchairs. I bought them five years ago at a going out of business sale at a coffee shop and put them in the unfinished basement of my old place which served as my combination video game room, storage area, and laundry facility all under a single, bare, low watt bulb. It had its charms. In any case, I moved to my condo two years ago and these chairs have been piled up in the garage ever since taking up hot real estate in the corner. I threw these out last night, removed all the crap in that corner, and put my '82 Honda CM 450 where they were.

It's this item, my first motorcycle, that's pushed the mess in my garage to the front of my mind. It hasn't run in a year and a half, and has been literally stuck in place for some time. I sat on it for a while and remembered how much fun I had riding it around. Sure I was a little embarrassed of its age and small engine, but ol' girl is my first, and she's extremely comfy in comparison to my zippy sport bike. I need a winter project so this is going to be it. My goal is to have that bike running again. I've already started by removing the front brake last night. Ugh. It really wasn't a frozen clutch that was keeping it from moving. I've been working on that brake since I dropped that bike in '05. Sheesh. I think I'm going to just rip it off, put a drum brake on the front wheel and call it a day. It's not like the bike will cross the 70 mph threshold again. The point of the story is even though the tubed tires are rotten, and the gas in the tank hasn't been stabilized no doubt coagulating into petroleum based life forms in my carburetor I'm determined to resurrect ol' girl.

And if that doesn't work out I'll dismantle her and sell the parts.