continued adventures of cleaning the office
I have a 16 square Ikea shelving unit in my office. Over the past few days I’ve managed to empty five of the squares. Enough of it went into the rubbish to make a difference, but I’m afraid quite a number of things went into boxes in the squares into which more things could fit. Still, it’s something. I’m now down to four empty squares, because I located and separately congregated all of the art and photography equipment, which ought to render them both more useable.
I’ve long since been ruthless with the research books, having gotten rid of more than half the shamanism books and keeping, mostly, things that had either wider mythological relevance, awesome stories about women doing amazing things, Regency-era research, and two books about angels for a project that may or may not ever come to fruition but two books isn’t overwhelming anyway. :)
But I must have…two or three hundred books of my own devising, and no matter how hard I try to get rid of them they seem to keep piling up. Sometime closer to summer I’m going to do another Clearance Sale, but for Reasons I can’t do it right now. It’s annoying, because if I could get rid of them, or even a decent percentage of them, it would make a huge dent in the Tidiness Factor, but I’ll just have to grit my teeth another few months.
I have…muted goals, let’s call them, to deal with the stuff in the boxes on the shelves. I mean, I have, for example, a quite good Rogue wig that I got right before I started bleaching my stripe again. Which I have to stop doing because although I got the worst of it cut off, it’s still not in great condition, so, I mean, like, where does that put the Rogue Wig? Does it stay or does it go? Am I ever actually going to wear it? Does it matter? How about the two white wigs I bought with the idea of coloring them to see if one would make a good Chiana wig? Am I ever going to *do* a Chiana costume?
Speaking of which, what about the box of sewing materials? I’d really very much *like* to do something with that, in fact, although the reality seems to be that it will sit in the corner until the heat death of the universe. But it *could* be that someday I’ll become the person I want to be, and actually sew something again, right? Right. And there’s some really good material in there, see, so…(sew…).
And there’s the Robin Wood tarot card set that I use about once every five years, but it’s so pretty! And honestly I’d really like the Giant Printer off my desk and *under* it instead except I have a five year old and it’s hard enough to keep him off it when it’s *on* the desk. And actually right now there’s another box of knick-knacks which have nowhere to live (because the shelves are too full of books I wrote) to be put up, so that would have to be dealt with before the printer could go somewhere else, and…
Anyway, it’s progress. I can’t do anything about the books right now so I should no doubt start dealing with the boxes, but it wakes a fear in me, it does. Mostly a fear that I’ll end up groaning and putting everything BACK in the boxes, which is what I usually do. (I did do a big purge on Box Stuff before we moved, which is why I ended up with half-empty boxes into which Random Wigs could now be put, but it’s still not enough. #woe)
Here’s a tiny picture of my much-diminished figurine collection, which is out of its boxes for the first time in 3 years…
(x-posted from The Essential Kit)