Some stuff goes.

One reason I have so much stuff is that I have two homes. One is an apartment in New
York City, and the other is country house in the Catskills. The upstate house has four bedrooms and three of them are being used for storage. The largest one is full of my grown son’s stuff and it badly needs to be tackled. It is full of boxes of old books and schoolwork, as well as clothes and furniture he currently isn’t using as well as his “memorabilia”, that is old birthday cards and letters, school newspapers, minor athletic trophies (he was only a minor athlete:). I nag him to decide what he really wants to keep, instead of letting inertia make the decision, which is currently the case. However, until I clear out my own unnecessary junk, I don’t think I have that much moral authority to bug him. So first I work on getting rid of my stuff, and then his turn will come, and I will go after his stuff.

Besides my son’s stuff being piled in the biggest of the upstairs bedrooms, I have bins and bags, big leaf size bags, filled with my own clothes. I have thin clothes, fat clothes, winter clothes, summer clothes, more clothes than I can remember to wear. The 80/20 rule is certainly at work here, though it probably is more like a 92/8 rule. With the season change I will be sorting clothes this weekend. I can easily throw out half of my summer tees. I will report back about how many I was able to discard.

10/13/2007—Threw out several pairs of sneaker socks that were too bulky and three stained summer tee shirts. I also brought to our apartment basement four books to a recycle bookcase and then donated a full banker box of books to my local library upstate. That was another twenty-five books. I then donated ten pairs of slacks (men's and women's), four tee shirts, five skirts, one nightgown and two pairs of shorts to a local clothes "pantry". This barely makes a dent, but it is a start.