Sunday, December 28, 2008

Quick update

We had a nice Christmas. Dearest Daughter arrived home about 5:00 on the 24th and we spent a quiet evening at home with a simple soup and sandwich supper, then a fire in the fireplace, conversation and opening family gifts. The next morning there were "Santa Gifts" and we watched the Geraldine Page version of Truman Capote's A Christmas Memory", then in the afternoon we went next door to the Brother-in-Law's for a large dinner, and family conviviality.


Yesterday we had a rather long drive to Illinois (heavy fog) to my brother's house for a visit and to pick up my Mom, who had spent Christmas there. It was good to see the niece and nephew who both seem to have grown 4 inches since last summer. Rain and snow on the trip back. It was good to finally tumble into bed a little past midnight.


Today I wrote my thank-you notes., because if I don't get them written before the gifts are put away (or eaten as the case may be) they tend not to get written at all. Since some of the gifts involved chocolate, this leaves a rather narrow window of opportunity.


I also started in on a sort of New Year's resolution. A little while ago I saw a passing reference on someone's blog (Marie's?) to getting rid of 50 things. This sounded like an excellent idea.


So far I have (1) gathered up one stack of clothes that have been unworn for at least two years.

These are now in a bag bound for St Vinnie's. I am counting this as one thing, because I have so much stuff to eliminate that this won't even scratch the surface.

Also bound for St. Vinnie's is (2) an assortment of tins.


They are cute, potentially useful, and collect dust like crazy (and I also have many more that I have not gotten rid of).

And (3) is a stack of books for trade-in at the Frugal Muse.



Not a very big stack, but I do clear off the bookshelves fairly regularly, because it's the only way I can find room for new acquisitions.

5 comments:

SSK* said...

I k-n-o-w that it would be a drop in the bucket to get rid of 50 things! Getting the family to agree to part with certain things is another story!

Happy New Year!

CatBookMom said...

Lovely tins! The one with irises is especially nice.

I am also going to try to shovel at least 50 things out of here this week; it's inconvenient for this purpose that 1/1/2009 comes on Thursday, not Saturday, lol!

Glad your trip was safe though long.

Anonymous said...

DH and I have agreed to empty a box of stuff every day. So far we have emptied exactly... zero boxes. But we have the idea and the agreement, and that is the first step.

The library has largely saved me from buying books any more. I just have to keep a space open on the bookshelf for all the library books :-)

Anonymous said...

I should probably do 50 things- 50 times over! I'm going to try the "15 minutes a day" bit for getting rid of stuff- and maybe finally getting organized! Thanks for the inspiration.

YarnThrower said...

You are inspiring me and my New Years' Goals! Less clutter always sounds good to me, and we have plenty of clutter!