the great (continual) purge

We are, as always, working on giving away some of the many, many possessions we have. We really do have entirely too much stuff. I notice that when we are more stressed, we buy more (which then leads to more stress and...hello, downward spiral). So, we're slowly starting to dig ourselves out of the last ten months' worth of stress.

I have been ever-so-slowly working on my own project (a.k.a. The Office That Threatens To Swallow Us Whole). I also worked with Pic on clearing out her room. I always think that she won't want to give anything away, that she'd rather be overwhelmed by all the stuff she has, but I forget (again and again) that she's not me. She's not me now and she's not me when I was a child.

She has given away bags and bags and a box of things she no longer has use for. We also gave four bags of clothes to our dearly beloved friends.

I'm not sure that I'm the most helpful helper, though, as I kept wanting to ask her, "Are you sure you want to give this away?" I can't count the times I had to check myself before I blurted that out. Geez. But we got through it and we can see her floor and we realized that she really had a lot less than we had thought, it's just that it was all out where we could see it (at least the top layer).

Among the stuff that I've cleared out:

* five years' worth of paperwork (okay, so I shredded that and stuck it in the garage for the compost bins)

* the crock pot (the one I used twice in two years)

* some other kitchen gadget -- I never even knew what it was (never used in over a decade)

* three pans, two mugs and a travel mug (no partridges, no pear trees)

* a jacket Cardo bought for me over a year ago and which I never wore

To go?:

* about nine hundred more pounds of paperwork (Me vs The Paperwork: The Eternal Battle)