The Little Projects of Operation Yoga Pants

Today is Monday, April 13th. Day 32 of Operation Yoga Pants. Allegedly, my office is supposed to reopen April 27th but I truly doubt that will be happening. I'm very happy working from home. This entire month has gone alright for me, no real frustrations with work, no real frustrations with being here. Doug is here too, but Geoff is an "essential employee," and he has to go to work nightly.

I decided at the start of the work from home period that I was going to undertake tasks and duties that needed to be done. I call them The Little Projects. It is keeping me sane. I still have a lot of projects that I want to get to, but this is the rundown of most of the things done so far.

• Cleaning out the back porch to make into an officeier space but also a Cool Zone chill space for hanging out, now we need patio furniture! 
• rebuilding the desk/table for a good place to sit
• hanging up the map of Essex County we've been schlepping around for like 25 years (Doug found it in the trash at the college he worked at, and it has been with us since)

• building the smaller table to put the BBQ items on to get them off the floor, and this very small piano bench we have, because it gets wet down there in the rain and the piano bench can be put to better use elsewhere in the house
• attend to the spider plants, repot the ones that need it, and take the babies off and put into water to grow more. Picture 1 is my new office mate Pete the plant, with my coconut drink holder from Kowloon in Saugus, MA. They're my pals!
  
  And you can see one of my plants really had grown itself into a frenzy, so I hope it is doing much better in the new pot.

• hang up everything that belongs in my closet instead of draping it across the footboard of the bed
• clean off the top of my bureau

• clean the floor and my bedside table
• sort through the boxes on top of my bureau to find all kinds of cool treasures

• sort all the pillow cases (I had dozens of them for some reason, no sheets matching them, ) and give the ones worth of becoming PPEs to someone local who was making them

• hang up lights in the back porch to make it more fun

• find the computer monitor, and order an adapter so it can work with my mac and I can do more things for work at one time (notice the awesome Gusterness for the two screens

• fold and put away all the laundry, twice
• wash the dog & trim her nails
• vacuum (2x so far)
• clean the bathroom (2x so far)

And then there is Sunday's little project. 

I set out to go through my bureau and take out all the clothes I do not wear, and put them in storage if I wanted to keep them, or pitch them if they needed pitched. 

I pulled all the socks and underwear out first. There is one big drawer that most of the socks and underwear fit in, and then four thinner drawers that don't hold as much so I had a bathing suit, a ton of scarves,  tourist memorabilia from trips we've taken. Another had my jewelry box and other miscellaneous and sundry items like bandanas which we can use to put over our faces if we go to the store (a new county ordinance is everyone needs to cover their face when shopping, but we own no masks). 

Back when we had to move out of our brown house after losing it to the bank in 2013, Doug, Geoff, and Thane were loading up the rental van with things to move to the new place. We had a table in the upstairs bathroom, and the drawer fell out of it in the driveway when it was put onto the van. They picked everything up, put it all back in the drawer, but a while later when getting organized, I noticed that my wedding ring was missing. 

Well, half of it was missing. It was a two part ring that fitted together, a big stone and a wee stone on one band, and a wee stone in the other band.  I hadn't worn it since 1998, after I had Geoff, and put on a lot of weight. The bigger part with the "engagement diamond" was the part that was missing. And that was the super saddest part. If the smaller part was missing I think I would  have been almost okay with it but still disappointed in myself for losing it.

I searched and searched, and later when the house was sold to a developer, at the closing I asked him to be on the lookout in case it slipped out into the hardwood floors, or the ground covering beside the back door. I'd gone back to the driveway and searched a few times, I just never found it, and was convinced it was still there. 

I never heard from the developer, after he gutted the place of all its colonial charm and redid the hardwood floors and put gap filler between the planks.

Going through my drawers on Sunday afternoon, I found something that belonged in my jewelry box, so I opened it and put it away, noticing the small part of the ring in there, lonely. I felt that sting of not knowing what ever happened to the other piece. 

I then moved some items out of the drawer, and found the memory card from my Aunt's funeral in 2015. Oh hello, Auntie. Nice to see you on this Easter Sunday in your pretty hat.

I lifted up the card, and there, under it, was the other half of my ring. 

I could have cried. Honestly could have cried. Slipped the rings onto my pinkie, the only finger they fit on anymore, and smiled. 

Thanks for protecting it, Auntie. This was a nice surprise.

Now, if I can find Doug's wedding ring... that'd be an extra special thing!