Office: in progress...

Uncovered my desk-top. Found a cheque payable to us and the camera-battery charger that I couldn't find last week.

Had a snack. 

Opened bills. One is two days overdue. Not good.

Had a snack. (Yummy orange zest cookies.)
Paid bills on-line and/or wrote cheque and prepared envelopes.
Put J's art into the designated tub in the basement.
Started to box clothes to give away.
Just got a call that my little guy isn't feeling well so I'm off to pick him up. Darn -- I was finally getting this underway!
Took out a bin of recycling and a bag of garbage on my way out.

Office: before

Remember my pretty little guest room?

We built it and guests did come!

Then we relocated the bed and converted the room into an office.
It was my haven, except for a little clutter in the corner.
Then I let it slide...

Yikes.
To think I've wondered why I can't get anything done.

This is going to take a while, because it's not just stuff. No, it's stuff, boxes of stuff(!), "treasures", books, and worst of all, papers.
I'm going in, armed with a hot cup of tea and a square of dark chocolate. Oh dear. I drank the tea and ate the chocolate while I wrote this post.

Back at it!

Hmmm. I think I need to come back here. Not for anyone else. Just for me.
I still have too much clutter and it's bugging me.
I have many things I want to do, and never enough time.
I put off the clutter busting... and everything else.
I keep coming back to the idea that if I get organized, I'll be more productive. It's true. I think I just stopped saying it because it was getting really embarrassing! How many times can you say that you know you need to do something before it becomes humiliating that you haven't done it?! I don't know the number. I just know the feeling.
I seem to have overcommitted myself. I am a parent (which I absolutely and totally love!). I am a wife (and so grateful for my awesome husband and our family). I volunteer at a hospital weekly (and know that I'm making a difference to others). I take an art class weekly (which I love). And that is the tip of the iceberg.
Time to get on track, get organized, and get productive. Life is short and precious. Every minute. :-)

Goodbye :-)

This blog has been... fun? I do enjoy the pink barbed-wire fence atmosphere, but no, not fun.
Motivating? Initially yes.
However, I can de-clutter much faster than I can blog about it.
In the end this blog has just become, well, embarrassing.
I mean, who cares?
My house still has some clutter, but far less than a year ago.
More importantly, I have better things to do than write about it, and you have more important things to do than read about it. I suspect that's why all clutter-related blogs die.
So, I'm signing off clutterbuster.
Thanks to the handful of followers who found me -- I appreciated your encouraging comments! Best of luck to you.

Baby Clutter revisited

I'm parting with the "storable" baby clutter that I'd put into limbo in my in-laws' garage late fall. This week I gave away most of the parenting books and a big plastic bin full of baby gear. My son re-claimed some of his baby books though; they might actually be useful for teaching him to read.
I see from the photos in my last Baby Clutter post that there was a blue bin of baby stuff too. I'll have to track that bin down.
Which leaves the big pieces: the Italian stroller; the perfect swing; the Exersaucer. I'm going to sell them, but not this weekend -- I don't want to talk about baby things at Easter supper. While I'm glad to be parting with them, it's still too sad to discuss at a family gathering.

"certainty and elation is the measuring stick for something being a part of her life."

If you have clutter, you should read Brooks Palmer. His book Clutter Busting isn't really about stuff; it's about us. He has a new book coming soon called, not surprisingly, Clutter Busting Your Life. I don't know this man. I just like his book and his blog.

Anyway, today a paragraph in Brooks's post Clutter Busting with Brooks Palmer: Permission to Let Go jumped out at me.

He was writing about a lady who had some papers in her kitchen. The papers were problematic, but she was resistant to dealing with them.

"I knew she had cats," he wrote, "so I asked if she liked her cats. She exclaimed, 'Yes, I love my cats!' I said that certainty and elation is the measuring stick for something being a part of her life. I pointed out that when she talked about the papers, she sounded depressed and exhausted. I said nothing is of value to someone when it takes their vitality."

This paragraph echoes something that my psychologist said recently. We weren't talking about clutter. We were talking about my life.

In particular, we had been talking about some courses I was thinking of taking. After a while, I told her that I actually have a dream. Not a sleeping dream. A crazy fantasy but-who-do-I-think-I-am kind of dream. Dr. V practically jumped out of her chair. You know that jumping move that you make when you're watching a sporting event and your team has a scoring opportunity? My psychologist did that.

So I told her about my dream. She categorically stated that she did not think it was crazy to pursue my dream.

Later, she elicited the fact that pursuing my dream made me feel, in my words, "elated, happy, excited." She said that those feelings are cues -- cues that I am making the right decision.

His

How to delegate a clutter-bust (hint: it helps to have a willing victim).
Me, standing in the bedroom closet: "Can I borrow you for five minutes?"
My husband, coming into the room and sitting down on the bed with a smile: "That's four more than you usually get."
Me: "Ha ha. If you sit way over there it'll take at least 10 minutes."
He gets up and walks into the closet, unsuspecting. Kiss.
Me: "Can you go through your clothes and pull out everything you don't wear?"
Five minutes later there's a pile of clean clothes on the bed.
[That sentence would be so much more fun if it said, "Five minutes later there's a pile of dirty clothes on the bed." But no, this is a clutterbusting post! No nudity. The only clothes on the bed were the ones that he pulled out of the closet.]
Suddenly I'm the one objecting to the purge. "This is brand new! I just bought you that! That's your Norwegian sweater!" (In-joke. "Two Canadians walk into a bar in North Dakota...")
After he left the room I tried on two of his rejects and put them back on my side of the closet. (I also took two of his rejects and put them back on his side! Shhh...)
I put the rest of the pile into a huge, ugly Christmas gift bag, added a few rarely used clothes of my own (amazing how you can always find more), and put it in the back of my car to be dropped off in a donation bin later.
The next day I stopped at a consignment store to pick up a cheque and discovered that they sell men's clothes. Who knew? So now my husband's purged clothes are for sale.
And I have been loving my two "new" sweaters which look a lot better on me than they did cluttering up his side of the closet. Go figure.
Easiest clutter-bust ever.