Woohoo!

Well, yesterday was very productive. I cleaned a lot of the house--well, really, picked up a lot of it. Most of the time, our sty isn't dirty but there are papers everywhere and books, etc. We just don't have enough space. For example, I straightened the bookshelf yesterday (one of them) and realized that we actually do need another entire bookshelf for all of our books, binders, etc.. We have six booksheves in our little duplex, and each of them is overflowing. Two of them are over six feet tall and over three feet wide. But that is not enough! So I put all of my law books on one shelf and then neatly stacked about a shelf's worth of books on top of them. Semi-organized. That's all I ask.

This many books must be what you get when there are/will be six college/graduate degrees between two people and both of them had (before those degrees) voracious reading habits. At least our collection is varied--law, evolutionary biology, public administration, anthropology, wildlife management and ecology, latin and other ancient languages and cultures, science fiction, "the classics" of literature, contemporary fiction. Plus, magazines that we LOVE do not get recycled, so we have several years of food magazines (which we do use for recipes a great deal), computer gaming magazines, and my Marthas and adventure magazines that I keep to inspire me. Can you see how we might need more shelf space?

Anyway, besides that I bought some bins to unload some clothes to make moving the furniture easier this weekend. Plus, I looked through a mememto shoebox (of things I will not throw away) and found that I could part with two things out of it. Obviously, we're sort of pack rats. I try to get rid of things that I don't love and don't use, but there are lots of things that don't meet those criteria. So they stay. I also try not to bring things home that I don't love and don't use, and I'm pretty good at that.