I Don't Want to Alarm Anyone, But . . .

...I'm sure that I've just experienced one of the signs of an upcoming apocalypse. Before anyone gets too worried though, I'll set your mind at ease. Several events have not come to pass . . . My kids haven't been able to spend an entire day without arguing over the computer. I haven't yet had an entire week where I could cook a nutritional and delicious dinner for everyone where we could sit and eat as an entire family every single day. The Cubs haven't won the World Series recently. And aren't pigs supposed to fly too? So there are several events that must take place. You still have time to prepare yourself. 

But for me, right here, right now, I have experienced a modern day miracle.  You see, I used to think of myself as fairly organized. Not this kind of organized:

Ugh! Who lives like this in real life?

But this kind of organized:

Now this I can do!

I was the queen of organizing our paperwork. Our accountant used to say how much he enjoyed doing our taxes each year because I would come to him and hand him a few files that had been organized according to tax categories with excel sheets and quicken reports to explain everything. If anyone came to me and asked me for a document or receipt I knew exactly where to go for it.  I had well organized files with categories and subcategories. It was a thing of beauty.

And then life happened. I'm not exactly sure when things fell apart for me, but it was a gradual thing, I think. One day I was skipping through my fairly clean office to grab a birth certificate so that the kids could sign up for soccer, knowing exactly where to find it, and now if I had to do the same task it would require me to tiptoe through the same office, hoping that there would be a few inches of clearance for my toes, only to find myself in front of a huge pile of documents, tossing them here and there in hopes that the certificate would magically appear. I'm not kidding, this is what my office looks like:

No . . . that's not really my office! I would never actually put a picture of my real life office on the internet for all the world to see. My office looks WAY, WAY worse than this. And the worst part of it all is that it isn't full of junk. No. All of the stuff that is littering the room is supposedly important. Someday, somewhere, someone is going to want to look at these items. There are receipts, bank statements, tax documents, real estate contracts, kids artwork, pictures. You name it. If it matters to me it is there . . . somewhere. So why in the world is it sitting in unorganized piles getting more and more scattered with each passing day?

Well, I blame Minsy. It's all her fault. Not really, of course. She didn't make the mess there. After all, she's only four . . . or three . . . something like that. While we were preparing for Minsy's adoption I was very concerned about keeping all my adoption paperwork organized. My biggest nightmare was arriving in China, only to find out that I was missing one crucial document, thus preventing us from completing the adoption and bringing Minsy home. So I was hyper-vigilant with keeping things organized, at least as far as adoption docs went. But in the meanwhile the rest of life continued. And the paperwork piled up. It didn't help things that we left for a family trip to China that took almost a month. I arrived home to find a stack of paperwork at least a foot and a half high that I needed to go through. Unfortunately the jet lag I experienced when I got home was a killer. I just couldn't beat it, no matter what I tried, so I got further and further behind. And at a certain point the task of catching up seemed so daunting that it really paralyzed me. All I wanted to do was sit in bed and read all day long. I got to read some super amazing books, so all was not lost, but reading books all day doesn't help the chaos to go away. The mountain of paperwork in my office just continued to grow. It became it's own little monster, scaring the holy heck out of me any time I approached it. So I avoided . . . and avoided . . . and avoided.  Yet again, that doesn't help things either. Something was going to have to change.

Well, this week I declared war on my paperwork. This was me:

Oh yeah! I was done. This paperwork was going to get organized, or I was going to die trying. (And what a horrible way to die that would be . . . lost in paperwork. Ugh!)

So I started on Monday systematically going through pile by pile. The chaos had gotten so bad that it was no longer confined to the office. Now there were piles of documents that were in the dining room and kitchen, constantly being moved from spot to spot, but never getting any smaller. Our financial records were a complete mess. That wouldn't be so horrible if we just had a normal, average financial situation. But because we own our own businesses and in addition have several rental properties nothing is simple. There are so many receipts and accounts to take care of. It wouldn't be that big of a deal if I was just taking a little time each week to update things. Unfortunately, I was not a good little accountant, so I hadn't updated things in months. MONTHS. The situation was absolutely horrible . . . but not impossible. 

One thing I discovered . . . I HATE accounting. I hate financial record keeping. I could never, ever do this in real life all day long. My mind just doesn't roll that way. Kudos to those who do this for a living. After a good eight hours a day immersed in our financial docs I was ready to pull my hair out, bang my head on the table, and even happily subject myself to a few hours of watching Power Rangers with Hy-guy and JoJo. I was a mess. 

But I also discovered that if I just put one foot in front of the other I could make a little dent in the mess. And that's what I did. It wasn't pretty, and it wasn't fun, but I was making progress. Pardon me for a moment while I do my own little happy dance:

Like I say, the end is not totally near. I did get all of our financial records updated and current. I paid all of the bills that had been hidden in a mountain of correspondence. But my office did not end up like this:

Yet again . . . Who lives like this?

I still have a lot to do. We still haven't gotten things organized enough so that we can do our 2011 taxes yet. I still have at least three years of children's school memorabilia to go through. But now I have a twinkle of  hope that I just might be able to do it. . . . Tomorrow.  Tonight I'm going to lay down for an hour or two and lose myself in a really great book.  The mountain can wait a few more hours.  But I'll get it done. Really. I swear. It'll happen. Yea for small miracles!