Sublte Changes

I spent two hours sorting and organizing yesterday (or, two This American Life episodes). Here is the final result:

See that patch of brown between the stripped bag and the gray totes? Yup. That's genuine floor space. If you look closely, you may also notice that the pile on the bed now consists mostly of stuffed animals, as opposed to last week's Stuffed animal/ cardboard boxes/ photo albums/ plastic bags/ piles of paper/ power tool collection (Yup. There's a Skil drill case in that first picture from last week. See if you can find it. It will be like Where's Waldo).

While I will openly admit that most of this is just rearranging/ organizing. I did meet my weekly goal of one trash bag thrown out. Here is what came out of the room:

As of this afternoon, everything in this picture has been either burned, recycled, or compacted.


My intent with this blog was to snap a photo of the stuff I was feeling sentimental over, dash out a few quick memories, and then chuck it.  I was surprised to find, however, that it was not the sentimental stuff that was tripping me up, but more the things I could use again later.  Take these string lights for example;

Half the plastic gummy bears are missing or broken, same with the bedazzled flowers. The lights themselves are still perfectly functional, however. I thought about their possible future as Christmas lights, and then I reminded myself I was standing amidst a sea of half finished (or never-started) projects, things that "someone else could use"   and other possibilities. So long, super-cool reading lights from high school and college.

Other highlights from the pile of crap on the bed:

My first grade book from the ALL School/ Claremont Academy.  Lots of As and Bs. My kids were pretty awesome, but not that awesome. This is where my bad habits as an easy grader began. 

I got this pink and purple boa on a band trip to Virginia my freshman year of high school. I now understand the love affair between feathers and dust that makes the feather duster so efficient. I spent a significant amount of time sneezing after removing it. (The string lights and boa used to be intertwined around the headboard. It did make for a pretty cool effect, if I do say so myself).

I will answer your two most obvious questions: 1) Of course a bed is a logical storage space for a bulletin board filled with  tacks that could get loose and become lost in a menagerie of fluffy stuffed animals and pillows. 2) A "Gotcha" is the Camp Takodah version of a Thank You note. This particular collection was from last summer, 2010.

BONUS FIND! That mattress has a memory foam pad on it! I had totally forgotten until I sifted through about 5 layers of stuff. There was a muffin tin at the bottom of the pile (yes, you read right). It made a super cool indentation that, sadly, did not photograph well.