Organizing and Racing – My fantastic weekend

I am having a really fantastic weekend.

Friday, after working in the morning, I went on my first organizing gig.  I put up an ad on Craigslist and got a response from a woman who was interested in having me help with the apartment she and her sister share.  She’s a really lovely person and we worked for a few hours on getting the very small kitchen in their apartment more lean and functional.  Mostly, we just took everything out of the cupboard, wiped down the cupboard, and put back only what she wanted to keep.  In the broad scheme, that’s really all there is to organizing.  And she really understood how to do it; she just needed a little push.  And sometimes I was able to give her little ideas that might help her in the space in the future.

In trade, she gave me a full case of the food product that she and her sister make as their small business.  I’m trying to preserve her confidentially here, so I’m not going to list the food item.  But let me say that it looks delicious and I have a lot of it and it’s very exciting.

Overall, I’m pleased with how well it went.  And I’m fairly certain that she was also pleased about it.  I’m hoping to go back and help her with other areas in the apartment.

And I learned many, many things yesterday.  #1 was that even if I’m used to my allergic reactions, other people are not prepared.  She had a few dogs, and with the dust and the pollen in the air, the triple-whammy got me sneezing and sniffling and red and puffy.  And she was very concerned for my health.  I’m working on different allergy medications now, trying to see what I can take that seems to work well (just go for a walk in the pollen and see if I explode) and doesn’t make me really tired.  I don’t want to take something that will leave me really groggy on the job.  But I need to have something that will make it so I can work and not make the client worried about me.  And sneezing all over their house is just a bad impression to make, really.

So I’m testing medication and I picked up a box of saline solution for my neti pot and I’m back to seeing if I can get used to pouring liquid through my nose and if it really helps my sneezing.  And I picked up some local honey which, apparently, if eaten regularly, will eventually help my body adjust to the local pollen.  And if all else fails, we’ve got a box of surgical masks from back when we thought Justin had tuberculosis and I can just wear those, after warning the client, of course.

Another thing I learned is that I will probably come face to face with one of my biggest critter problems:  spiders.  As I’m helping people shift through messes, I’m very likely to run into a variety of creepy-crawlers.  And I’m frightened by spiders.  I’m not sure yet how I’m going to get over that, other than just gritting my teeth and dealing with each spider as it appears.  And hope that clients are sympathetic of my aversion.  Yesterday, there was a dead spider under the sink that I wiped up with the rest of the detritus in the cupboard.  It made me shiver, but it was dead and I had work to do.  Hopefully that mentality will help me face the next spider.

My last major lesson of the day (and there are several smaller ones that I just won’t go into here) was that I really need to get business cards.  The woman I worked with said that as soon as I have cards, she’ll hand them out like crazy.  She knows a lot of people and many of them would be interested in having me help them.  The sooner I can get some cards, the sooner I’ll be able to drum up more business.

So I’m talking with Justin about a design and all the things that go into that.  I have a name for the business that I would like to use, and we’re going to set me up with a website.  I still need to register the name and get a business license and business insurance and all those other things that I’m still not really sure how to accomplish.  But as soon as I can, I’m going to get some business cards.  Even just cheapy little ones that I can get for free from VistaPrint—so long as they’ve got my name and phone number, I can get started.  I can work up to nicer ones later.

This morning, moving on to the other lovely thing of my weekend thus far, Justin and I woke up unreasonably early for a Saturday and went to my place of employment to run in their second annual 5K race.  One of my goals is to run in at least three races before my next birthday.  I haven’t been training very well, and with Justin’s eye bothering him, he hasn’t either.  But we’d decided that we were going to go and we were determined to stick with it.

Justin ran near me for the whole race.  Instead of running it like a race, we ran it like a group-run.  Just going out, running with a whole lot of other people, some of whom were actually just walking it.  So there was no pressure.  And the only goal I had wasn’t to run a certain pace or speed or anything.  It was just to run the whole 5K without having to stop.  I hadn’t done that in a long time.  And our time was a slow 35 minutes and some seconds.  But I ran that whole stinkin’ course without stopping to walk one step.  It’s a little discouraging to see people walking ahead of me who managed to keep ahead of me the whole time, but it’s not about beating them!  It was totally about me making the whole distance without stopping, falling over, and dying of exhaustion.

And I made it all the way!  I have an enormous blister on the inside of my left foot that I’m still not sure about.  It felt like there was a rock in my shoe, but I couldn’t find it.  When I go running again later this week, I’ll have to see if it was something on my sock or what it was.  My biggest problem today was my heart.  My average heart rate was really too high—up around 172.  I kept pulling back because it kept creeping higher and higher and I know that I can’t let that happen.  I should go check my blood pressure at work several times this coming week to see if that’s gone back up again.  I was doing very well about keeping it low.  But if running made my heart go so crazy, I’m going to have to work on that harder.

To congratulate ourselves for a job well done, we came home and napped for a couple hours after our shower.  And tonight we’re going out to dinner at a place called Jim and Nick’s—I’ve heard they have really fantastic barbequed ribs and I’m drooling just thinking about it.

Tomorrow we’ll get some work done.  I’m going to put up another ad on Craigslist, see if I can’t get another gig to come in.  Now that I’ve seen how well that can go, I’m excited to get another opportunity to try.  And now that I know that I can run the whole 3 miles, I’m going to try to get back into running more dedicatedly.  See if losing a little weight doesn’t help my heart a lot.

I hope you’re all having as fantastic a weekend as I am!  I’ll be back again soon to babble at you some more.  🙂