One of my ongoing goals is to organize my home/life. I tend to start this project several times a year and then get completely overwhelmed and quit without accomplishing much, and sometimes having made things worse. This year I’m trying something different: as much as possible, I’m tackling small projects and doing them from start to finish. Today I organized my bookshelves.

Since I started working in libraries I don’t buy nearly as many books as I used to, but I still have quite a few. Many of them are in storage, but the ones in the house tend to get disorganized pretty quickly. When I don’t have places to put things I just start stacking, so today I was sorting through piles of books and other stuff and putting them in order back on the shelves.

It’s very dusty work, so I weeded and cleaned as I went, and I’m quite happy with the result. I have room for all the books I want to keep in the house plus a little extra for growth, and everything is in order and visible. I am one happy librarian!

Eric and I have both had the past few days off, so in addition to plenty of relaxing we’ve been clearing out some of the accumulated clutter that has built up since we moved into our house 10 years ago. We have a garage, an attic and a basement, so there are lots of places to stick stuff and forget all about it.

Now, I THOUGHT that I had done a pretty good job of sorting through all my personal memorabilia and getting that down to a box or two, so I’ve been mainly concerned with clearing out the crap that has no sentimental value and just piles up because we don’t know what to do with it. But yesterday we found a couple of boxes that I didn’t even know we still had, which turned out to be filled primarily with memorabilia from my high school and college years. I found a couple of things that I thought had been lost (a scrapbook made for me by my first college roommate; autographs from Tori Amos and Mary’s Danish), but also tucked in there were some relics from the days when my organization system consisted of “I don’t want to deal with this now – throw it in the box and I’ll figure it out later.” In this case, about 14 or 15 years later…

This is an unopened box (still wrapped in plastic) of Poison perfume, which I wore through high school and college. It was the only time of my life when I had a “signature scent,” and I have to say that was not a good thing as I wore way too much and somehow failed to pick up on the not-so-subtle hints from friends that I might want to tone it down a bit. Anyway, I basically OD’d on the stuff in college, so I haven’t worn it since. This box still has a Nordstrom price tag on it ($45, in case you were wondering), so Eric thinks I should put Nordstrom’s famous policy to the test and try to return it!

Wow, I’m so glad I saved these 5 1/4″ floppy disks. You just never know when you might need…yeah, this one is just embarrassing. I have absolutely NO idea what’s on these disks or why I thought I needed to save them. The labels mean nothing to me. But they have been taking up a little cube of space in my attic all these years. Oy.

Okay, this is just plain hilarious. These are thank you cards that I wrote for college graduation gifts and never sent (I graduated from UCSB in 1993 – do you think it’s too late to drop these in the mail?). I actually wrote the cards, and some of them were addressed, so it’s hard to figure out why they didn’t get mailed. My excuse is that I left for Texas the day after graduation to do the Shakespeare at Winedale program through UT Austin. We were living on a farm and had little contact with the outside world, and I just never made it to the post office to buy stamps. I found these cards in an accordion file with a bunch of other similarly significant paperwork – 15-year-old utility and credit card bills, graduation cards, stacks of flyers for a play I was in. Yeesh.

Okay, well, now that I’ve started the New Year off by embarrassing myself thoroughly, it can only get better, right? Have a laugh at my expense and feel better about yourself. Happy New Year from me to you!