The Annual Purge

This is the time every year when I start to notice all the SHIT that has piled up everywhere in my house over the last year. There are certain places where everyone throws things all year long. It’s only by the end of the year that I really notice and one of my typical New Year’s resolutions is to clean out those collective garbage dumps.

I went through a drawer in our kitchen and found calendars for the last 5 years and scads of expired coupons not worth the paper they are printed on. I saved the BB&B coupons because they never expire (even though they have an expiration date) and threw away all but the 2006 calendar. Those and the phone books that haven’t yet expired were all that was left. I felt mildly victorious at just having started this cleanup, so I quit for that day.

We were actually prompted into cleaning out the pantry earlier this year when the beetles forced the issue. There are some things that just can’t wait for the end of the year to arrive. But those bugs were a pain in the ass to get rid of.

There are places like the attic and the basement where people in my family think they can just leave things and no one will notice. The problem is that unless you move regularly (which we do not), those dropoffs tend to take up all the extra space. But then, who really cares what the attic and the basement look like?

Then there are file drawers. I really hate to go to file something and find that the files are so full that I just cannot possibly cram something else in. Whose job is this anyway – this job of winnowing files? No one obviously wants to claim it!

I can already sense that my interest in fulfilling this New Year’s resolution is slipping away and I am settling into 2006 with comfortable piles in lots of places. The management of STUFF was once an obsession of mine, but it has taken a backseat to other obsessions these days...