I'm trying to figure out why I'm blogging here on AliveNotDead with only one friend on my list (Hi Mark!). It's an uneasy, slightly anxious feeling probably brought on by the spring cleaning I have been doing.

Last week my husband and I purchased two shelving units. One of them is a stainless steel, 4-shelf affair that looks nice in our kitchen, while the other is more of a garage-friendly utility shelf for our small storage room off the kitchen. The storage room shelf came complete with over 30 plastic bins (it makes me drool with organizational pleasure!). I have spent maybe 20 hours at this point categorizing, dusting, tossing (4 13-gallon garbage bags so far), and putting things in their new, more logical places.

I'm ashamed to think of how many piles o' stuff I had in my cupboards. Mountains of beans/grains/spices/nuts/seeds/miscellany occupied several places - the cupboard above the microwave, the pantry shelves, the smaller cupboard above the stove.  I had bags of split peas in all these places - 5 bags total, 2 opened and half-used. The same phenomenon occurred with brown sugar and corn meal and spaghetti and baking powder.

I know how it happened. I would decide that I needed something for dinner or a cookie recipe or something, and I would not be able to find it in my cupboards. So I would buy some at the store, use some of it, and then, not knowing where to put it, just sort of add it to a pile o' stuff. Without a specific place for things, I would just put it "somewhere" and then not be able to find it again. it always seemed harmless as an isolated incident, but these incidents eventually added up to kitchen chaos.

On the other end of the spectrum, it is nice to be able to just set something down in a temporary spot and not be too anal about it, to say to oneself, "I'll put it here until I find a good place for it," and not worry about it. But that kind of scenario causes a low level of anxiety in me, because I've experienced how "temporary place" can easily become "permanent mess".

In my true metaphor-finding fashion, my kitchen disjunction has caused me to reflect on my life in general. I am a person who needs to have things in their places. Could this also apply to my inner nature? My skills and attributes? I think of my marriage as a place where I can put my skills. My children, too. My few friends. How about a career? And yes, my blog. I'm tired of my "things", both inner and outer, being spread out all over to the point where I can't even find them.

Maybe this is what daily prayer and meditation is - a sort of dusting off of the things in one's internal kitchen, saying to oneself, "Yes, I have that ingredient, I need more of such and such, and this goes there." Fasting, which Baha'is just did for 19 days recently, might be considered a sort of spiritual spring cleaning. Maybe that's why I'm in this mode.

Back to the subject of blogging on AliveNotDead - I'm pretty sure this is not my permanent place (no offense to this wonderful website). It just feels like a temporary put-it-there place, like the top of my refrigerator (where I found, hidden among nylon, zippered lunch bags and dusty old boxes of tea, FOUR separately-purchased packages of straws, for crying out loud. We never even USE straws!). I knew AnD was a temporary place for me when I started, so it shouldn't be a big deal. But I'm in spring cleaning mode, and I'm a little neurotic. So there it is.

It feels good to dig these things out of my messy thought pile and get them out in the open where I can see them. (Breathe deeply...)

I've been wanting to start a blog of my own, but have been relying on my currently very busy husband for technical support in order to get my own website going, and that's not happening. So far. So I've decided to start blogging here on Alive Not Dead, even though I feel like the cyber version of a wallflower, shy and off to the corner, no one (practically) knowing I am here.

What's important to me right now is to get practice blogging, so here I go.

This is one of those days that my husband, a native to the Seattle area, calls "bright", even though the clouds cover the sky so thoroughly and thickly that the sky is completely white, with not a trace of blue to be seen. As someone who grew up in Montana, I consider this to be a gloomy, ho hum kind of day that makes me thankful for a warm home and the invention of comfy sweaters.

Despite the intermittent rain and wind, I planted my first seeds today. I went under my mother-in-law's porch, which connects to our house, and filled 50 tiny peat pots and several clay and ceramic pots with potting soil and seeds for tomatoes, pumpkins, strawberries, and various herbs. I have big plans for our garden this year, including the adding of a permanent herb garden, creating an "island" of blueberries and strawberries, and giving my daughters their own small plots.

As I write this, I can see through my computer room window that a section of clouds has thinned to reveal a stretch of light powder blue in the sky. And there's the sun!

Spring reveals itself gradually. As do I.