Cleaning out

This weekend was supposed to be a sort of vacation weekend for Ruf and me. We weren't actually going anywhere (we can't afford to after our trip to London just 6 months ago!), but we were taking the weekend off from all obligations, such as teaching Sunday school (both of us) or singing on the praise team (me). We were supposed to enjoy a nice concert in the park at the Fort Worth Botanical Gardens after spending a wonderful half hour or so at Pendery's World of Spices. (Okay, wonderful for me, as Ruf says that Pendery's is his Radio Shack. That comment comes from the fact that I've told him that I find Radio Shack to be the most boring store in the world.)

That was all screwed up because Ruf found out at 4:30pm on Friday that a client had to have something on Monday. Poor guy has had to work all weekend.

I've been making good use of my time home alone. My craft room has been nothing short of a disaster lately, embarrassingly so. I've been on a huge cleaning and cleaning out kick. I even tackled the closet in the craft room which has been a hodge-podge of random stuff we rarely access. For example, I found a bag full of backup disks for a computer I haven't owned in a decade. I found the video camera I used to film my dance team (back when I was a dance team director in my first year of teaching 11 years ago). The sound no longer works, and the technology is hopelessly out of date. I discovered we're actually old enough now to start shredding all those boxes of financial documents that the experts say we should keep for 7 years. I found photographs I didn't remember even having. My old jewelry box that I hung onto for no discernible reason was pulled out of the depths of the closet. There were boxes for cell phones we haven't owned in years. I found a wonderful book of photography called Christmas in America; a friend gave it to me as a going-away gift when I moved to Europe our junior year of high school. (She and I shared a Christmas Day birthday, so it was an especially appropriate gift.) I even found an old check register from 10 years ago, and it was fascinating to see how differently I spent my money back in my single days. (I shopped for clothes a lot!)

The shredded pile is huge. The trash pile is even bigger. The giveaway bag is filling up. And I'm not even close to being finished.

But it sure feels good!