The thrill of cheap therapy: Cleaning stuff out

I am therefore I organize.

Organizing to me is second nature. I don’t know how to not organize. I’ve had friends hire me to organize their stuff because it is just my thing.

Very little thrills me like the taking of a mess and making it a beautifully organized masterpiece.

The past few weeks I’ve been doing tons of pitching, throwing out, donating, and organizing. I’ve peeled back a whole ‘nother layer of stuff and it feels good. Weird to be doing it during the holidays, but I was in the mood and went with it. Now that we’re down to the last 24 hours of the tax year, I’m finishing up so we can take one last load to Goodwill. I know there have probably been some very happy people at the Goodwills around here because we have gotten rid of a lot of stuff, some of it very nice.

I’ve also gotten rid of things that we kept because it is frugal – except when you don’t have the room to store it and still feel like you can breathe. Like an entire tote bin of bubble wrap. Gone. If we need it, we’ll buy it. A huge pile of tissue paper. Several rolls of Christmas gift wrap. Sweaters. Kitchen stuff. Caroline stuff. And on and on and on. It’s out of here and it makes me very happy.

I’m resisting the urge to pull down all the Christmas decoration in my organizing fit. I always have mixed feelings about it. Sad because the season is over but so relieved to have a less cluttered house. In past years I was especially sad to put away the Christmas decorations because we had some very less than ideal Christmases so I always felt like the year was incomplete. This year we had a very nice Christmas. No illness, no bad weather, and everyone liked what they got. (Well, there was the ill-fated Christmas Eve service that we left because Caroline could not sit still for literally more than fifteen seconds. I felt badly for the people around us and we left before it was over. As we’re walking out I’m imagining people saying – Older parents with spoiled only child who can’t make her sit still… Whatever.)

I’ve also been decluttering A Quiet Simple Life. I’ve been deleting tons of old entries, combining categories, adding photos and just generally streamlining things here. Merging four blogs has made for a lot of clutter here and I’ve been trying to make the archives more valuable by removing the chaff and reorganizing the categories. I’ve been working on this for weeks and weeks as I’ve had time and imagine it will take many more to finish. David is still working on fixing some of the glitches with the site as well. He finally got the most recent video feature at the bottom to work. It took only a few minutes when he did it. He just had to find the time to do it. Isn’t that the way it often is?

Overall, I’m just enjoying the thrill of cheap therapy: a freshly organized and purged life.