Clean Sweep

This morning I went looking for a new booklet of checks to put in my checkbook.  I looked in my desk drawer but found only an empty box.  I remembered that Ted had given me a new new box of checks but where did I put them?  I looked in all the desk drawers and came up empty.  Could I have put them in the cabinet across the room?

I opened the cabinet with some trepidation because I knew that opening it would be a lot like opening Pandora's Box.  Let's start with the good news.  The checks were in there, right in front.

The bad news was that the cabinet was horrifying.  I am a person who prides herself on being neat and somewhat organized.  Not label-every-shelf-in-the-cabinet-organized, but organized nonetheless.  Looking at the jumble of contents in the cabinet would have actually made anyone who didn't know me think that I was auditioning for Hoarders.


This is where the real trouble started.  I decided to take everything out and clean things up a bit.  Not a good idea for an otherwise peaceful Sunday morning.

Here are a few highlights of what I found:

A complete set of school directories dating back to Charlie and Kate's elementary school in Los Angeles;

A collection of bar mitzvah, wedding, and other special event invitations covering at least the last eight years;

Seven empty, never used loose leaf notebooks, all in pretty prints.  I actually remember purchasing these binders for a recipe organizing project that obviously never got off the ground;

Gourmet, Food and Wine, Bon Appetit, Martha Stewart Living; and Cook's Illustrated magazines dating back to the beginning of time;

Plus, all manner of odds and ends to numerous to catalogue here.  (A example would be 5 Maine fisherman bracelets purchased, no doubt, on our various summer camp visiting day trips to Maine over the past eight summers.)

Need I say more?

But I will.  I got myself a couple of big garbage bags and started throwing stuff away.  It was painful but cathartic.  Who needs all this stuff?  I showed no mercy.  I went through those cooking magazines and culled out, only leaving myself a pile to quickly go through in case there's something really good I want to keep.  Most of it's already online anyway.  I was a cleaning machine.

So now I have two empty shelves in the cabinet.  Plenty of room to start accumulating stuff all over again.