But wait! I can explain!!

The Wizard is due home in a few hours, so I'm doing this early tonight. Daylight even appears in the background of some of these pictures.

First of all, after two days of rain, all the leaves fell off the trees in our front yard. I can always hear the birds in that tree in the morning, but today I could also see them:

 The cats were very interested. Except for our poor Shadow, who got out onto the balcony while the sliding door was open and then wasn't sure how to get back into the bedroom:

Use the cat flap, Shadow!

But never mind the wildlife, here's the midday status of the bedroom pile of boxes:

Pretty good, huh? There are books on the bookshelves. There are no more boxes on the floor. There is a pile of debris on top of some of the bins. Not too bad, if I do say so myself.

Here's the same scene several hours later:

As you can see, there are boxes back in this area. On the shelves where you can't really see them (I'm going for total honesty here), there is one box of photographs and one box of stuff that came out from under the bathroom sink during the renovations. There are four boxes of Passover haggadahs and other materials, and three boxes of yarn and other crafts supplies. And on top of the Rubbermaid bin stack, there is a box with video game equipment that needs to go somewhere else because we never play video games in this room. So, all in all, that's not too bad. I moved all the bins and stuff over in front of the shelves so that we could move around a bit. AND I vacuumed the floor! (You can tell 'cause the vacuum is still there.)

I will admit that the pile of debris is also still there, but 10 boxes of office supplies have been consolidated from the contents of many more boxes and have gone out to the shed, 5 boxes of books have been emptied onto the bookshelves, 2 boxes that hold Future Vet's stuff have been moved to Future Vet's room, 7 boxes of papers were reduced to 2 boxes, bunches of stuff went into the Freecycle pile.... I'm happy here. 

And here's the other side of the room:

 The temporary piles of boxes are gone! Yay! I still have to deal with all those bins of crafts stuff, but that's a task for another day.

And then there's the balcony, which you may recall, has stayed fairly neat the last few days:

Uh-oh..... What happened?

I thought that it was time to put all the K'nex pieces into some kind of storage that made them more easily accessible. So I headed out to Target this morning and bought these drawer units. They are really cool -- the drawers come all the way out and have handles so they can be lugged around easily. And they stack!

But I kind of ran out of time to actually take all the K'nex pieces out of their current bins and boxes and put them into the next bins. Maybe tomorrow.