Friday Report

[adair]

I continued my effort to move 500 books out of my house this year. So far 32 have gone, and I have plans to work on certain shelves in my double-stacked bookcases. At least so far I have been surprising ready to let go of books, at least some of them. Most of the 32 have been science fiction and fantasy that I once thought I would re-read, but now believe I don't care about enough to do that. A couple were books I brought home from the B2P workroom because they looked interesting, but a bit of reading convinced me that I have better things to read, so back they go. I have hopes that I can really do some book removal, and therefor make shelf room for books I want to keep.

I also started sorting all the recipes I clipped from magazines or printed from the web, mostly the New York Times. There were messily stacked on the bottom shelf of my kitchen bookcase, and sprawling on the floor. I tried once to put some of them into a notebook, but that fell by the wayside. I finally pulled all the clippings and sorted them into 4 groups - greens, both recipes and advice, - other sorts of food recipes - recipes and suggestions for alt.support.diabetes back in the days when it had good posts - and last, things to throw away. This last was smallest pile, but just getting the other groups sorted is going to make it easier to see which of the rest I really want to keep and use. My plan is to start with the greens group, and get an organized batch of information into my food notebook, and may use some of the recipes. A lot of the recipes looked rather similar as I did my first sort, so I expect that a good many will be discarded. My food tastes seem to have been consistent.

Comments

[redsixwing]

Wow, you're making good progress! *cheers you on*

The recipe sorting sounds like a really interesting project. I have a bunch of clippings too, and your sorting method sounds helpful.

[adair]

Thanks for the encouragement. I need it - this book thing is rather daunting.
Sorting the recipes into sub-groups is the only way I can hope to get the work done. If I do not do that I am sure I will keep saving duplicates, or similar recipes, because I don't remember what I have. Good luck with your recipe sorting; it's a challange.

[tanaqui]

Congratulations on making more progress with the book decluttering. I hope focusing on particular shelves helps make things easier and faster, especially if there are things in the double stacked shelves that you'd forgotten you even had.

Also, that sounds like a good "divide and conquer" approach for the recipes to help you weed out duplicates and things you're not interested in. Here's to less paper and (re-)discovering some nice recipes!

[fred_mouse]

32 books sounds awfully close to on track for 500 books. Good luck with maintaining momentum.

And the recipe sorting sounds awfully familiar. I suspect I have a pile somewhere that didn't turn up in the great paperwork sorting of 2017 (because the box that they will be in hadn't been touched in so long it could actually have any of the paperwork I was looking for). I hope that when I find them I can be as organised as this!

[adair]

Thanks; maintaining momentum is the real key to this. I am not keeping a list of titles removed, but I am keeping a count of numbers by month. I think listing titles makes it too easy to have regrets that will stop the process, but numbers are a mark of accomplishment.

I find a lot of my paper sorting works best if I start with general groups, and then break those into sub-groups. If I try to sub-group too soon there are always those papers that turn up later. I did make a practice of putting recipes into this one messy pile, so it think this can be a final sort.