What to Do When You Can't Sleep

Took a nap about 6:30 last night. Woke up just before 11:00. LittleBit was back from visiting her dad and sound asleep. Working on the sofa table that I'm building was out of the question, LOL.

Made myself a bowl of apple oatmeal (old fashioned oats cooked in apple juice instead of water, with a smidgen of cinnamon and/or freshly-ground nutmeg). Poured myself a mug of milk. Went through my inbox.

Decided to organize the 50-drawer plastic cabinet I acquired over the weekend. Nearly full of seed beads, bugle beads, sequins, and pearls in assorted colors. I thought it would be useful to print a label for each little drawer, using my return address labels, and to color-code the labels to roughly match their contents.

A more far-sighted person would have carefully removed the drawers and arranged them in color families before beginning to type the labels. Not me! First drawer: black matte bugle beads. Type label. Go on to next drawer. Red shiny bugle beads. Type label. Third drawer: black seed beads. Swap drawer #2 and drawer #3, type label for drawer #3, renumber drawer #2. Obviously the previous owner of this collection was not mildly-to-somewhat obsessive about having her colors whoop through the rainbow like the Grambling marching band.

And so it went, combining drawers occasionally when I could see no distinction between their contents. I think it took the better part of four hours to peer and decipher and play musical chairs with the drawers and their labels. Four hours of happy puttering for a job that would have taken half an hour, tops, if I'd let my inner mathematician be in charge. When I was done, I cut-and-pasted to a fresh label form and printed them up.

And now it is an hour until my alarm goes off. Suddenly I'm sleepy. Go figure!