Friday, December 29, 2006

Something's gotta go

There is something deep in my little brain that wants to have the house clean for the new year. I was mentioning this to my boss when he called and said he didn’t have anything for me to do this weekend (Yahoo!)
He’s fairly widely traveled, most recently from Hawaii but I believe he lived in Singapore for some time. He told me the clean house is a deeply held tradition among the Chinese. I think I have also read of this tradition and in fact it might even be where I picked up the idea of the big pre-New Year’s purge.
My house is not going to be Chinese New Year clean. But I do plan to get the (s)crap room cleaned out so I can work in there. It’s taken a big hit over the holidays, what with my making pajamas, cards and mini-albums.
In a constant, futile, attempt to be organized I have established files for:

Scraps of paper (by color)
School and church memorabilia and photos (by family member)
Paper I will never use (by theme)
I have even gone so far as to throw out back issues of scrapbook magazines dating back to 2003.
I briefly thought about going through all of them, carefully tearing out inspirational ideas and filing them. But after about three magazines my back said “no more” and my reasoning, logical mind was laughing hysterically at the thought that I would ever remember to use such a file.
So I gathered them all up and tossed them in the dumpster.
I’m still a long way from having a usable space in the room, but by golly, now I have all my paper scraps organized by color, should I ever remember to use them.
You should hear my reasoning, logical mind. I think it’s going to wet itself from laughing.

4 comments:

Karen said...

I found that moving goes a la-ah-ah-ng way towards helping one de-junk. I got rid of at least half of my stuff (trash, DI, and recycling) and so far don't miss any of it!

Anonymous said...

I am particularly facinated by the assortmend of paper you will never use sorted by theme. I have similar thinks in a box in my garage. (It's probably the box I thought was my china.) I can testify to effacacy of moving as a dejunking method, but at times it is simply a way to lose good stuff and throw away other stuff you use seldom, but has value. I am forced to acknowledge that daily cleaning is preferable to yearly dejunking, but as a practitioner of neither method I guess I'll continue to discard china and save paper I will never use sorted by theme. Such is the price of bone laziness.

SageHen said...

I have heard rummors of this daily cleaning method of which you speak. I always do a very good job of this, during the first week of January.

I have decided I will not move again. If I need to relocate, I will simply pack my family in the car and start over again from scratch.

Anonymous said...

I have entertained the idea of a flame thrower. Maybe just moving is less extreme. However, there is no amount of money that I would take to move again at this point. (Maybe if the money were actually in my hand.)