No, not THAT purge. Like you, I’m looking forward to THAT purge, but the topic of this post is something else…
Hubby and I are moving this year. We’re switching coasts. We’ve been sharing a domicile for over 20 years now, and neither of us could be described as being compulsively neat. I’m not sure we quite qualify as hoarders, but we both end up with possessions that we don’t quite know what to do with. We don’t necessarily want to keep these things, but because they are useful or beautiful, they could be desired by other people, so we don’t want to just throw them out. On the other hand, there is also a lot of utterly useless stuff that we jut need to throw out.
However, with the prospect of moving and selling the house, we need to reduce what we own (and will therefore move), and otherwise empty out the house. During the break between semesters, we have devoted some of that time to decluttering parts of the house, hubby far more than me.
In order to keep the more public parts of the house in reasonable order, we have stored the junk in our disused bedroom. We call it the Crazy Aunt Room, the one for which the door is never opened, particularly when we have company. The photo above shows you its current status. (Keep in mind that this is taken during the purge. Before hubby started working on this, it was actually worse.) So a significant amount of the effort of purging (though certainly not all—there’s still the basement to deal with) will be emptying the Crazy Aunt Room.
Hubby has managed to get rid of much of the old clothing he knows he’ll never be wearing again. Fortunately, there is a used clothing store run by the local Catholic church the takes such donations. I need to do this, too, though my volume is a bit lower than his.
We have a large number of books. These are heavy and expensive to move. We need to figure out which books we’re never going to read again and find ways to get rid of them. There are “Friends of the Library” book donations, but I also have a fair number of scholarly books that I wish to give or sell to someone who would be able to make use of them. I know there are websites devoted to this—I just need to get moving on this.
In my own preliminary effort at purging, I found in the Crazy Aunt Room my 20-year-old failed tenure application from my previous institution. All I could think was “Why the hell did I keep that?” It’s now gone for shredding.
Hubby has a collection of kitchen antiques willed to him by one of his great aunts which have never been unpacked. There is a great deal of angst and guilt over this, and the outcome has yet to be determined. I also have a number of family heirlooms that would be difficult to part with. I anticipate that our new house is likely to have it’s own Crazy Aunt Room, but I hope it will be a little less cluttered.
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Top Comments (January 14, 2021):
From thesphinx:
flycaster writes an excellent imagining of what Joe Biden might say to Lindsay Graham & the rest of the Republican Senators who are asking him to persuade the House to call off Trump's second impeachment. From RETIII’s recommended post on how Biden could respond to Republican calls for him to stop the impeachment process.
From your humble diarist:
This comment by Don Dumitru succinctly summarizes Sen. Josh Hawley’s predicament—“only Donald Trump is Donald Trump”—in Kerry Eleveld’s front page post on Hawley’s fall from grace.
Highlighted by wildblue:
This comment by RETIII in his own recommended post.
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