uncluttering one day and one thing at a time

It has come in small bursts of activity here and there, but in April I did manage to find new homes for over 80 fanzines, took a couple boxes of linens, clothes and small decorative items to the charity donation place, used up some older foods in the pantry, and finally finished my family photo curation project! 10 smallish albums and a lot of boxes were condensed down to one large photo album and two smaller ones, encompassing 160 years of family history dating back to the US Civil War in the 1860s. I can't tell you how many photos I eliminated and tossed, but it was 2 large trash bags full. There are still a lot of photos and each and every one has been identified with names, approximate ages, dates and locations. It was such an emotional journey to winnow these down. I confess to having shed a lot of tears during the process and my goodness, it was HARD. But it is DONE!

Hoping to repeat the success in May, with another large collection of fanzines and clearing my desk and paper files to something more manageable. And possibly start packing up some moving boxes. I may get rid of some furniture pieces as well, since I am downsizing to a much smaller place.

I finally made the hard decision that it is time to sell my house and move closer to my son. Part of the prep is serious decluttering for a big downsize. Don’t know yet where I’ll be living after the move, but it will definitely be smaller.

Right now I am concentrating on two rather emotional tasks: curating thousands of family photos and also sorting through all my fanzines to see which are keepers and which can be released. Hope to scan a few of my favorite zines but doing it large scale won’t happen (I have maybe 150 zines).

Today I worked on the photo project and started a trash bag of discarded photos. It seems like taking photos goes in spurts and so many photos are of the same occasion and are nearly duplicates.

I also finagled my little old desktop scanner to work with Windows 11 and managed to scan one zine for posterity. At some point I’ll try to find the discards a new fannish home.

Oh, this is going to be such a long and tedious process. But at least it is very good motivation for clearing out a lot of stuff!