oink; or, step away from the printer

oink.
I'm a hog. Also a pack rat. Maybe not quite at the level of the Colyer Brothers, but I do tend to amass and wallow.

Last Tuesday, I was home from work, recovering from the side effects of a Reclast infusion. Apparently, one of the side effects is a sudden realization that one is living in squalor.

In my case, the squalor I focused on was piles and piles and heaps and more piles of papers, on tables, on my desk, on the floor, stuffed into tote bags...

Side effects be damned. I got to work. Nearly all of the papers, you see, were knitting patterns. I'd say that I'd purchased about 15% of them, the ones in nice plastic protectors. The rest were free patterns I'd discovered on Ravelry or in my wanderings, and printed. I'd always meant to organize them, but - hadn't -

It took me 4 hours to sort them into general categories ("feet," "head,""hands") and to dedupe them. The oinkage wasn't just in the sheer number of patterns I'd collected. No, that wouldn't have been a problem. The oinkage was evident in the number of times I'd printed some of the patterns. (I'll admit to 10 of one particular pattern that has always stymied me by line 5. That must mean something.)

After the sorting came the hole-punching. Then came the vacuuming. Then came the stuffing into an inadequate number of looseleaf binders, and into trash bags. Then came a shower...

I'll get around to an index one of these weeks.

What do I do for a living? I'm a cataloger. I organize things...

I was happy to discover, hidden between the patterns, some short works by Elizabeth Gaskell, amongst others, and articles about various folk /fairy tale heroines that I'd printed out a couple of months ago. (So that's where they went.) They'll travel in my tote bag to protect me from a reading emergency. (One of the great horrors of my life is to be stuck somewhere with nothing to read. I'm sure you all know that.)

At the risk of sounding like a commercial --
The side effects of Reclast (flu-ish symptoms and aches, etc.) are so, so worth it. Listen up, women: we are fortunate indeed to live in a time when osteoporosis can be diagnosed early and treated. Some of the women in my family have been ravaged by the disease. At 57, I've broken ribs by coughing, and I've lost 2" in height. (I don't want to get much shorter than 4'11'' - it's already hard enough to reach the knitting magazines at Barnes & Noble.) Meds in pills have maintained my already-compromised bone density fairly well, but the once-a-year infusion will maintain and may even build bone. Whatever you do - Don't take your bones for granted.