Cleaning

I forced myself to take a break from reading today and actually accomplished some cleaning. I worked on the back storage room. It's not done by any stretch of the imagination, but I have this Clean Sweep euphoria about being able to see even the tiny patch of floor that I opened up today.

That room has been a convenient dump site for years. It is the last bastion of crap-in-boxes, that phenomenon anyone who has moved a lot is painfully familiar with. My goal is to make it all go away. The room will probably still have a bunch of stuff stored in it, but I want to be able to walk in and not have to vault over stuff to get to wrapping paper or my store-in-inside holiday stuff. This past year, I simply didn't put out all my Santas because I couldn't get to them. Absurd.

One day, I'd like for that room to be a bedroom again, but I have to clean out the storage van (an eighteen-wheeler trailer) first. That's not a task to start when the day''s base temperature is over 100. Maybe I can do it in stages. A lot of it needs to be thrown out or sent to someone who can use it. Who knows? Maybe I'll find something wonderful to eBay and be able to afford some shelving for the van. Right now, there's a really scary system of old doors and wooden spools holding everything up. Every time I go in there, I am secretly afraid the whole thing is going to fall down like a house of cards.

Once I get everything out of the back of the house and to its final destination (charity or the dump), I will be a happy woman. Hopefully this week will be the magic week in which all that stuff and the big stuff that's collected near the barn will all leave my place. Increasingly I feel like Thoreau about things. The railroad is riding on me in the form of the seemingly neverending piles of junk I have to shuffle from place to place in this house. I want it Zen, stripped to the bone essentials.

Actually, that may not be strictly true, else why would I keep eBaying? I guess it's better to say that I want things of my own choosing and that are useful rather than things that have followed me from another life somewhere and no longer function for me. The guy on Clean Sweep (and believe it or not, I cannot think of his name as much as I've seen that show) always talks about not confusing keeping an item with keeping a memory. The first time I heard that, it really struck me. I don't have to keep the set of ceramic geese Granny bought at a yard sale somewhere to remember her. To be honest, I do have a lot of things that I love and won't get rid of because they were this person's or that one's, but this guy's philosophy has helped me get rid of lots of things that hopefully have gone to make somebody else happy.

Well, Law and Order: CI is on, and even though it's not Goren and Eames, I am going to watch it and go to bed. Where is Goren? I need a tall, cute, smart guy fix....