clean out the clutter

It is Bad. It is very, very Bad.

What a hideous embarrassment.

If I had skeletons in my closet, I wouldn’t be able to find them.

17 August 2008. Worked on The Room of Doom for 8 hours today. No visible progress.

Cold, flu, laziness, procrastination, feeble excuses… and back to square one.

I’ve been going through boxes of books for the last two days or so. I managed to part with three boxes of books, which leaves me with six or seven boxes. Why is it so hard to part with books? It’s not like I’ll ever have the time to actually read them!

Now the ones I’m keeping are more disorganized than ever.

Also, there are a few books I know I have, but I didn’t find them in the boxes. That means there are more hiding somewhere! AAAAArrrrrggghhhh!!!!

Today: get the book boxes out of the living room, and go through some electronics/computer boxes and, if all progresses as planned, DVDs and CDs.

Read the books, then into the fray: that was the plan. Here it is, five days later, and I’ve touched nothing in the Room of Doom. I read the two books, though! And I hauled a couple of bags of magazines and vhs tapes from the living room down to the library to donate them.

I have to work a half-day tomorrow (Monday); I’ll use that as an excuse to get nothing else accomplished.

Clutter, procrastination, lack of confidence, and depression all kinda work together, don’t they?

I checked out two books on de-cluttering from the library today. I realize that reading about things rather than doing things is yet another form of procrastination. But I just got home from a trip, I’m a little bit jet-lagged, and I have the lingering remnants of a cold, so I’m not quite ready to tackle the Room of Doom. My plan is to rest and to read about de-cluttering on Wednesday (Independence Day—Freedom from the Opression of Stuff, perhaps?), and sally into the fray on Thursday. Yup. That’s the plan.

I’m feeling a bit like archaeologist Howard Carter as I excavate the Room of Doom: “Mold! Everywhere the hint of mold!”

I actually unearthed a mummy today. Appropriately Egyptian, it’s a mummified cat. Don’t worry, no kitties were harmed in the making of this colossal mess. Rather, it’s a mummified cat I found underneath a house some years ago. It was naturally dessicated, and so naturally, I kept it. It’s in a Ziploc bag inside a Reebok shoe box labeled “Mummified Cat, 1992.”

Not that I have anything against cats, but I also have a very nice little cat skull, although sadly it’s missing a fang.

The unfortunate side of this is that the stuff I’m finding is so cool that I’m discarding very little. I am, nowever, getting together a pretty good stack of boxes requiring further sorting. It’s time to let go and share some of this junk with the world through the magic of eBay.

But not the cat mummy.

Okay, back to work.

I worked on this for quite a while today. It’s gonna take a LOT longer than I expected. :-(

After running across Passepartout and a two-headed snake, I gave up for the night.