Average Jane’s ’08 Household Purge

When I ordered the dumpster last week, the guy told me that they’d leave it for seven days. Don’t ask me why I believed at the time that we’d probably call him and tell him to pick it up early. Right now it’s a little more than half full and we still have plenty to discard.

We’re actually making pretty good progress, but we just have so much stuff that it’s a challenge to put everything away even after we’ve separated the wheat from the chaff.

Right now I’m hung up on the huge plastic tubs o’ crap that have been hogging space in my office since November 2, 2006. Yeesh, it’s even more embarrassing with a date attached. I managed to empty one of them, but the other is mostly files, junk mail and the occasional CD (Steve Miller’s Greatest Hits! Natalie Imbruglia!). Everything is so jumbled that I have to look at one thing at a time and it’s taking forever.

Here’s a progress report:

Items Found

• My passport
• A nice floral dress in my current size
• Some black sandals I forgot I had that go nicely with the aforementioned dress
• The keys to my safe deposit box
• Two tubes of lip gloss and a good lipstick
• A huge collection of "You Don’t Know Jack" CD-ROM games
• Four "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" candy bars

Things Put on Craigslist

• GameBoy Advance SP with PacMan World 2 game
• Miscellaneous art supplies (which I’m donating to the Dreaming Zebra Foundation because they asked)
• Wrought iron canopy bed frame
• Sony Mavica camera (the kinds that uses 3.5" floppies)

Injuries Sustained

• Sore biceps from dismantling a wooden shelving unit with the flat side of an axe
• Dropped a baseball on my bare toe, which hurt more than you’d think

Judging by the current state of my office, it’s going to take several more days before I’m finished. When that day comes, though, I’m breaking out the champagne!