Beshert! Untangling Knots, Part I

Remember last September, when I was in despair about making absolutely no progress on the cleaning up and throwing out of stuff?

Well in order to empty the bedroom so it could become green, everything movable had to be moved out. Including the computer. I could not imagine voluntarily forswearing the use of my computer for several days, so John Leonard graciously helped me move it and its associated desk-like surface into the machsan. However, to do that, the machsan had to have room for it. So we made all the stuff on the machsan floor go away, and now I have a private little computer room.

(Do you think moving the computer from the bedroom to a separate room will affect the content of my blog?)

But it didn't stop there. At a recent Soup Salon, Noorster allowed as how Rappy had helped her to apply Apartment Therapy and the results were spectacular. I went to inspect, and engaged Rappy on the spot. That is, through a confluence of circumstances I can only interpret as beshert, Rappy is on a temporary hiatus from her usual work and has time to spend as an Apartment Therapist for selected clients/friends.

On the appointed evening, she came over and did a five-minute reconaissance, after which she informed me that things were going to get worse before they got better. Not only was all the stuff from the newly-painted bedroom still clogging up the living-room, but all the stuff from the new computer room - not counting the computer and its desk - would have to come out, temporarily clogging up the newly-painted bedroom, because a total overhaul was necessary. And since over the years that the computer was in the bedroom various work and household administration files had migrated from one room to the other, there was not only too much stuff, but what wasn't too much was in the wrong room.

Upon further analysis, it beame clear that the computer was going to remain in its new home, turning it forever from machsan into office, and therefore an air-conditioner was required. The air-conditioner that makes most of my apartment habitable in summer doesn't have enough power (or vents) to reach the computer room. When the room was a machsan, serving the functions of a closet/attic, climate control wasn't important. But for someone who went into the computer industry back in the 1950's mostly because of the guaranteed air-conditioning (!), the idea of sweltering while trying to type in a Tel Aviv summer was most unappealing.

Enter Amnon, the air-conditioning guy. I called him on his cellphone and he happened to be driving his truck around the corner from me at the moment of my call (another beshert!), and could come over to inspect immediately. It was a Thursday, and by the following Monday my new air-conditioner was installed. Not a moment too soon, for later that week an emergency editing job came my way, simultaneously with a heat wave.

So this past week all the piles of stuff in the living room and the bedroom sat patiently combining their years of accumulated dust with the new dust from the air-condition installation that was layered over everything, while I happily untangled knots of turgid prose in a business document. While so doing I realized that my life at the moment is devoted to untangling knots: metaphorically both in prose and in piles of files, and literally in my knitting. My next post will be more about the knitting...and the tangles therein...