I’m avoiding the baskets of junk. Even though I had time last weekend, I couldn’t bring myself to start digging in. Fortunately, there are always other things to do!
- My paper system was working nicely. I regret that I never took photos of it, for it is no more. I had a tray for current papers, a shoe box for Girl Scout related papers and a shoe box for receipts. Down the line I was going to do something fancy to the boxes to make them look nice, but Emma asked if she could have them to make a house for her Shopkins. Since the result was having papers all over again, I spent most of today sorting, shredding and recycling, and getting our tax papers ready for the accountant. This is my replacement solution:
The folders are in the purple bin, the tray is for papers I need to sort, and the binder has my current and old menus, routines and cleaning checklists, and fun things like lists of books I want to read.
- I made February’s menu, trying to be a little more specific on taco nights and salad nights. I was a little late getting it done so I missed the first couple days. Recently I discovered Emily Bites which has a lot of great recipes, though I only worked in one this month.
- A few weeks ago I started watching White Collar on Netflix. The main character lives in a great apartment with nicely organized bookshelves, which led me to conclude that my own needed reorganizing. I tried to group books a little more by author, series and genre- it’s still loosely organized but better than before. It was a slightly spontaneous- I came home from work Wednesday with a couple hours free and didn’t think it would take long. I guess I blocked out how long it took in the past because I didn’t finish till today, and only because we had a snow day. But on the plus side, I got rid of more books. My goal was 20, and I stopped counting when I reached it, but I estimate I got rid of about 50 which I will drop off this week. Many were books Emma outgrew. Since I’ve been going through my books more regularly, I’ve monitored the books I didn’t read or didn’t finish, and decided most of them would never be read, so I added them to the donation box. My photos of the book wall were blurry so I only have an after, but there’s an older photo here.
These are just some of the shelves, so you can’t really see the difference that getting rid of books has made.
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