browser life

Have been scarce on the computer again because I've tried to dedicate more time to unpacking. When I realized recently that we've been in this house for a quarter of a YEAR now and I still don't know where stuff is, I decided to quit waiting for some energy to return and push myself a bit. My progress is still maddeningly slow by most people's standards (including Dan's), but every box I empty is one step closer to victory.

Dan has volunteered/threatened to just empty all the boxes, stash the contents wherever and let me sort it out at my leisure. I'm trying to keep him from doing that because I'll never be able to find anything. Usually when he goes into a cleaning frenzy, he "tidies" first and then tries to remember where he put something later; if I do it myself, it may take me until Christmas, but I rarely lose anything.

Actually, at the moment, I'm proud of myself because I finally finished the command center and the bedroom next to it, and it was a bitch. I basically took records, receipts and the like that had been scattered throughout a 9x9 bedroom, a 9 foot wide closet and an 11x13 bonus room and squeezed them all into a filing cabinet, a desk and a closet that's only three feet wide! I still have a pile on the desk of things involved with projects on the computer (like e-mail addresses of people I promised to write to after I got moved in), but the stack is only about three inches high versus the three separate piles a couple of feet high of unfinished stuff I had in Denver.

The hardest thing besides the lack of energy is the forcing myself to throw things away. I did some de-cluttering last May when we were getting the house in Denver ready to put on the market, and some more when packing up in November, but it wasn't nearly enough. And I will freely admit I'm still keeping way too much stuff now, but some progress is better than none.

I have a rather discouraging legacy. I don't consider myself outrageously materialistic, but most of my family, both on my mother's AND my father's side, has serious pathological pack rat issues. I don't mean things like saving newspapers to recycle them, I mean things like hanging onto receipts so ancient that they can no longer be read and actually weeping when someone tosses it into the trash.

So I am actually kinda brave in comparison, but it is still difficult and exhausting, and I keep changing my mind and fighting with myself over things. For instance, I emptied over a dozen shoeboxes' worth of receipts and filed them into the new cabinet, but I couldn't bring myself to toss out the empty boxes, thinking I'd still need them for something. After several weeks, I finally put them in the garage tonight so that Dan can break them down for recycling at some point.

One thing that seems to help is black trash bags. When I'm feeling conflicted about tossing something that could be even minutely useful, I throw it into a black trash bag so that I cannot see it, and I tell myself that it is now trash that absolutely cannot be retrieved. If I leave items out where I can view them, I'm more likely to decide to keep them.

I'm far from perfect. I did manage to toss out dozens of ancient file folders that I think may have belonged to my mother in the 1980's, but I have kept blank paper of every conceivable kind that is at least as old. My rationalization is that being a writer, I will always need something to write on, but I will never have to buy paper again, heh heh.

One thing I'm pleased about is the pile I have made of things for Dan to shred. If I piled it up single file, it would easily reach the ceiling. The only question is, how did I manage to move a dozen times and STILL have insurance EOBs from 1986??

I do have a game plan for the rest of the unpacking. I'm going to head upstairs as soon as tomorrow if I'm up to it and start puting away the three remaining bookcases' worth of books and then get to work on the collectibles/mementos. When that's done, it will be back downstairs to organize my hundreds of CDs/audio cassettes/vinyl albums.

The wall hangings won't go up until the other stuff is done because they're all packed together, and I'd like to distribute them evenly around the house. I'm saving the scrapbook/photographic stuff for the very last because it's going in the back corner of the basement. When I have done all that, I will declare the house unpacked and get back to things I'd rather be doing like blogging and reading and working on my websites and other forms of communicating with the world at large.

So me not posting much might be a good thing, at least it will be if it means I'm using the time to finish moving in. Gotta keep reminding myself that empty boxes are a sign of accomplishment.

One. Box. At. A. Time.