Friday Report, about a month late

[adair]

I have been doing bits nad peices of sorting, but achieving very little until las week. We bagan deep cleaning in our bedroom - the first in what needs to be work in other parts of the house as well. A musician friend is planning to visit in August; the only place he can sleep is on the living-room couch, and the room is covered with stacks of books. and everything is very dusty. So is our bedroom; we have been sneezing and B nees his inhaler. When I looks, the windows have not been cleaned in a long time, the curtains and windows have not been opened for at least a year, mildew was forming where no air movement had occurred, and I suspected there was some on the walls behind the bookcases.

There are 3 bookcases on the walls, 3 in stacks on other furniture, big stacks of books in front of said bookcases, and everything needed work, and clearing. I moved all the books into the libing room to join the stacks already there, cleared the tops of the bookcases, moved the bookcases and cleaned the walls behind them. I took down the curtains, cleaned the windows and all the wood around them - lysol worked - put the bookcases back and started filling them again.

This is when clutter removal happened. I had books on crochet and weaving that I had not looked at for years; I thought I would like to weave, but never did any. The weaving and crochet books left, freeing 1/2 a shelf, which was quickly filled. I also removed a box with a fairly sturdy cardboard table loom I had never set up. I am planning to take it to BTP for the fall sale; surely someone will want to experiment for $5. I also found I had a substantial number of journals and notebooks. I seem to buy the periodically with ideas of using them, but that has not happened very often. I am trying to keep Morning Pages, but that is not going to fill all these journals any time soon. I picked out a few with spiral binding and took all the bound journals to BTP for the fall sale as well.

I have a LOT of zines; I sorted about 4 boxes, mostly B7, but some others, and sent them to the Iowa zine project probably 15 years ago. I still kept a lot; I actually do re-read some every year or so - the latest reread was the B& Hellhound series, which was never completed, but still is satisfying to read. Confession time; there are 7 shelves of zines, B7, Pros, Highlander, Forever Knight, and a few other odd bits. I also have two shelves of fanfiction printed from LJ back in the day and stored in notebooks.

I need to consider letting go of some of this, but I am not at all ready to do that yet. At least most are organized on shelves and dust-free now.

I moved the stacks of books from the bedroom back there, after looking though all of them and pulling about 7 to move on. This makes no visible difference whatsoever, but some are leaving, and I have started to think about what I keep and why. These are my prison and criminal justice books; I have a lot, but most of what I kept are the human stories, not the books with statistics and theory.

Anyway, I am back in the de-cluttering game, and hope to keep things moving. I have removed 30 books so far this month, so that is a start. Thank you for reading my whine about too many books.

Comments

[finch]

Booking is hard! And cleaning is excellent progress too.

[kalloway]

Sounds like you've gotten a lot done! I definitely understand how hard it is to prune fandom stuff, especially (probably)irreplaceable fandom stuff like zines and printouts. I still have some printouts around from ff.n (circa 2002) that I'll probably never re-read but I just can't quite get rid of them yet. ^^;;

[tanaqui]

Wow, that's a huge project! Congratulations on your impressive progress so far and good luck with the rest of the work and finding more things that you're ready to let go.

[yukonsally]

great work!