Starting Point: Caring Is Creepy

So, overall, today was pretty epic... in a good way. For the first time since I was probably a baby - no joke - my room is dusted, vacuumed, and organized from the tops of my shelves to under my bed to inside all drawers to my cabinet thing. The recycling bins are full and the side door to my house is blocked from even more. There was a bag of garbage thrown away and three or four bags for GoodWill and consignment. I seriously must have gotten rid of at least half of the junk that was in here. I also have two huge tubs full of things that I don't use put away for storage so there's less to move when it's time to start construction on this side of the house. I'm so excited to redecorate my future room; I think I've got some pretty neat ideas.

All of the shelves in my room are completely empty aside from a coin jar and a small bank my mother made me when I was little. It feels so empty with everything missing from the shelves. I want to take them all down and put pieces of art in their place.
I found a lot of cool things too, like prayer journals and booklets from different youth services and activities when I went to Oakview Baptist Church. I also found stacks and stacks of doodles and notes, my prayer box, and a diabetes prevention planner that my mother bought me last year - she's convinced my hypoglycemia will one day escalate into type two diabetes because of my lack of a good diet and "good" exercise. I think she just worries too much.
Finding all of my things from Oakview made me miss having a home church. If only Okeechobee didn't suck. I really think a lot of the people here are a little backwards and all of the other youth groups I've tried to be involved in seemed kind of like a non-accepting clique.
Anyway, the project took me collectively about thirteen hours to complete. I actually cleaned for 8 consecutive hours today; from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. I wish I would've had more time to complete other smaller tasks, but I did get a two hour nap in! So maybe I'll work on something tonight since I'll probably be up later.

I seriously went all out today, vacuuming the dust from my curtains, lint-rolling pillows, and washing out the inside of my garbage can. It feels good. I also washed my bed sheet, found some clean pillow cases, and plan on taking my comforter to the dry cleaners on Monday.

I took an after video. I think I'm going to ask Becca to upload it and the pre-cleaning video to one of my accounts tomorrow when I go to borrow a book if I don't go to my grandparent's house.
Going through my things I thought about how much Derek's impacted my life. I've changed so much since that September. I'm starting to feel like God wanted it to happen to me. I'm starting to feel glad that it happened. Well, not really glad, but it's caused a lot of positive turn around. Who I was was completely centered on what I had done, or rather, what I hadn't. Although I was pretty down about it, I saw the changes even then. Good ol' Joel; thank God for Joel and his pep-talk that made me realize that it wasn't the end of the world. I am relevant and I have a purpose... somewhere. It feels so good to actually do things for myself and not depend on someone else.

On a less serious note, I made a peacock out of a dollar bill! Haha. I had found this dollar origami book and decided that I needed to take a 20 minute break and make a peacock.

I also had finally decorated my Munny Kathleen gave me in January last week and I feel like posting a few pictures because Tara's the only one who's yet to see it. He has roller skates.

Here's more pictures from the aquarium. There would be more but my camera shut off in the middle of Flickr's processing the pictures.Those critters were so fun to take pictures of.