Summer 2022: Days 53-57

My Joe-batical goal of fervent decluttering and reorganization is biting me in the posterior. On the back half of the leave, I'm ready to say I'm Marie Kando-ed out ...

I've actually achieved much over the past four days, and I'm in a place where I can wrap it up, get the storage in a decent place, make my office functional, and remove the spillover into other parts of the house that understandably occurred. But, I'm giving up on some of the stretch goals, and I'm content to tackle further organization later. For example, there are still a few crates of clothes deep in Michael's closet -- that he mostly ignores -- that can stay there until after he moves into the dorm (which is, yikes, only three weeks away). Reconsolidating the CD collections -- which I already did with the cassettes -- can wait as well, because the CDs aren't haphazardly stored and aren't creating clutter.

I'm just ready to be done -- and be content that the things I wanted to make more accessible are more accessible. We donated several bags of clothes, along with books, toys, games, and small suitcases we'll never use again, to Deseret Industries. I dropped those off today, along with 12 bags of documents that needed shredding. The space created will help future decluttering.

Mostly, the house has dominated the last five days. Ben's state meet ended (which also sort of derailed my good Joe-batical mood -- I loved watching him swim, but it was a tiring week) Friday, and the weekend was cloudier and a little cooler than it had been. I grilled Saturday and Monday; today I just picked up Papa Murphy's pizzas. After seeing the dentist, running errands, and driving Ben all over today, I was exhausted, forsaking the basement cleanup for 90 minutes lying in the sun and cooling myself off with the hose in the backyard. 

And no, I didn't write these past five days, which is also why I want to move on from the decluttering. I'm ready to be creative and don't want the though of a mess derailing that.

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