Art with soul and spring cleaning in the middle of winter.

My husband used to play the saxophone, did I ever tell you that?  He picked it up as a teen thinking he’d learn to play sexy tunes so all the girls he fancied would dance provocatively around him (joke a la Eddie Izzard).  This didn’t happen.  Instead, fifteen years on his wife digs it out of storage, polishes it, and puts it on the shelf in the living room.   I love its beautiful contours and intricate parts, and I love how it fits in with the canvas art I made a few weeks ago.  I myself never learned an instrument, after being told at nine that my recorder playing was “wrong” and that I “probably wasn’t cut out for music.”   I had a wild idea that I would LEARN how to play this sax that lasted for about 24 hours before I came to my senses and realized I do not have that kind of free time. At least, not without giving up games or reading or something.

Much like the creep of holidays into earlier and earlier territory each year, so follows the so called “spring” cleaning.   This year I started with my laptop: clearing off programs, deleting copies of copies of copies I seem to build up out of nowhere, and organizing all of my photos into a more comprehensive system.  I even deleted a 30GB sized folder full of nothing but funny images I found online.  What?

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I didn’t even look in it, just threw it out.   Ran the disk defragmenter, opened the laptop itself and gave it a good cleaning with the can of compressed air.  Runs beautifully again, and I’ve never had it this organized. I also rolled out a new blog layout.  Spiffy, huh?

I’m excited that spring-cleaning-in-winter this year includes painting and decorating the bedroom, as it’s been completely neglected as we slowly improve upon the other rooms in the flat.  The bedroom still looks as it did when we moved in, right down to the bare bulb dangling unceremoniously from the ceiling.   I’ve got a lot of ideas, and it’s going to be fun.  I’m feeling productive at the moment, inspired, and I’m ready to begin: home improvements, my next course, the rest of the year.

 Perhaps winter is a better time for our cleaning anyways, spring is for fun.