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Sometimes a minor opportunity gives you a nudge and the momentum carries you to the finish line. (Or near enough.) Back in 2011 when I packed up the Oakland house, I had enough lead time that I did a lot of sifting and decluttering, but there were things I just wasn't ready for. (Or things I hadn't yet come to, such as letting go of the SCA.) But I set myself up for some future success when I decided to get rid of 14 drawers worth of filing cabinets and put the contents in bankers' boxes for later processing. When I moved into my current house, there was a stack of maybe two dozen boxes in the back of the garage that didn't have a clear "home location". Gradually, either because I figured out where the stuff should go, or because I had a chance to sort through it, that got whittled down to maybe about 20 boxes that got moved into the house and stacked in a sort of half-wall between the kitchen and the craft room.

Some of them (mostly journal offprints) got farmed out for scanning, an ongoing project with no urgency but a looming sense of unfinishedness. Some of them got moved into the library closet when I organized that as my "publications inventory" location. And that left about 9 boxes containing old financial records, old correspondence, fiction projects so old they only existed in manuscript hard copy, in-process research projects (ditto), and other random things.

A few weeks ago, during my weekly dinner with Denise, the random comment came up that some day she could bring a project over and keep me company while I started to tackle them. Sooner than we expected, the stars aligned last Wednesday and I made it through 4 of the easiest boxes (financial records and correspondence), taking it down to a half-box of immediate-family correspondence I wanted to keep.

With that momentum, I also sorted through one of the remaining file drawers (more old financial records, so I could included them in the same shredder delivery). And then this past weekend, when I was feeling too lethargic for anything but re-watching favorite movies, I pulled out the remaining boxes and tackled the more complicated stuff. In the end, most of it wasn't as emotionally complicated as I thought.

Lots of obsolete correspondence. Gone. Lots of SCA-related paperwork. Gone. Handwritten fiction projects dating as far back as high school (mostly written in pencil on notepaper, which means a lot of it was smudged badly enough I wouldn't have a hope of deciphering it anyway). That took a little more consideration and I did save a couple of projects that were tied to some con-langs I used for worldbuilding. But honestly, a lot of it was a vague outline of a generic fantasy adventure with maybe a few pages of the scene that inspired it. I saved the two completed novel manuscripts (one of which I don't anticipate ever going back to, one of which I plan to rewrite completely saving only the setting) and a few stories that had gotten polished enough that they collected rejection slips. I need to check them against my electronic files to make sure I have a final copy on the computer, after which I can let the paper go. Associated with the fiction were a lot of character doodles in the margins of my collect class notes. I hadn't yet figured out that I needed some sort of fidget mechanism to allow me to focus properly on lectures. Doodling was fairly harmless, but it led to writing out scenes and plot summaries on the backs of class handouts, which may explain certain test scores.

There was also a surprising amount of emo poetry of the "Private! Keep Out! Do Not Read On Pain Of Death!" variety. (The sort of I often wrote in one of my con-langs for extra security.) That was a rather pointed reminder that in my 20s I was not a happy person and I had no one I could talk to about my emotions. It's easy enough to let go of the paperwork that documents that era; harder to let go of the memory of spending more than half my life having no close friends I could trust with my inner life.

The last box was extra copies of handouts for classes I'd taught at some point, xerox masters of publications I have no expectation of ever reprinting. (I have electronic versions of the text for all of them.) Notes and annotated drafts for several professional articles that I've had published. Gone.

Those five boxes got sorted down into half a file drawer and half a box that needs to either be scanned into electronic form or double-checked against computer files. (Thank goodness for powerful searchh functions, because the organization of my computer files are not as logical as I'd like to believe.)

So...no more boxes between the kitchen and craft room. That means I need to examine the furniture organization that was working around it. But I have some ideas there. Maybe the momentum will take me through into finishing the kitchen decluttering I started at the beginning of the pandemic. Then I tackle the craft/sewing cabinet.

 I'm the sort of person who likes to move the furniture around sometimes just to see if my brain works differently. That's part of what I'm doing with my kitchen re-org. I have Too Much Stuff and I'm trying to find ways to either make it all fit better, or at least make the stuff I use more accessible. Given that it's a nice spacious kitchen with a single occupant, you might think there would be plenty of room. That doesn't account for my fondness for gadgets and having One Of Everything.

Like: I'm trying organize my "coffee area" in an esthetically pleasing and functional way, but I own a Keurig, a French press, and a combo espresso machine with mid-size drip pot. And I use all of them at various times. Mostly these days I use the Keurig, but the espresso/combo isn't something that you can conveniently tuck away in a cabinet when not in use. So they both need counter space. But the French press, the bean grinder, and the milk-steamer pitcher can all live in the cabinet in space made by getting rid of less favored coffee mugs. The last item that gets actual shelf space is the cookie jar shaped like an old cast iron range that I store my k-cups in. (Mostly I use a re-fillable filter cup, but I keep a variety of k-cups for convenience,especially for guests.) So although I clawed back a little bit of counter space, it mostly comes from getting rid of mugs.

In the bit of counter to the left of the range (maybe 2ft wide?) where I used to have the toaster oven, I've moved the assorted handy-to-the-stove items (jar full of wooden spoons and other implements, knife block, bottles of things too tall for the cabinets. These, of course, used to take up just the same amount of space in the larger corner area to the right of the range and the left of the sink. But anything that was deeply back in the corner was hard to get at. so I'm going to move the toaster oven into that corner because I don't need to get at the corner itself, just the front. The blender also goes in that area since it gets used regularly (and is too tall for the cabinet where less-used appliances get stored).

That leaves me about 3 ft of counter space along the wall to the right  of the range where other regularly used appliances *could* go. But I'd have to think about which items get used often enough to deserve a place there. The crock pot might be a good choice, but I don't know. A lot of the odd-but-regularly-used gadgets are in the corner cabinet with the two-level lazy susan style (that occasionally drops things off into the corner). I have an idea to maybe swap those out with the baking gear that currently lives in the mobile kitchen island. But honestly, a 3/4 circle round shelf doesn't really fit much of anything well. I must ponder.

Now the *really* lesser used appliances ought to go in the top shelves of the cabinets--the ones I have to climb up onto the counter to get at--but of course that makes me tend to forget I even own them. And if I forget I own something, I should consider getting rid of it. For example: I'd have a hard time telling you off the top of my head the contents of the cabinet over the refrigerator. It used to be where I stored the serving platters and bowls I'd accumulated for SCA feasting, but I gave almost all of those away in the SCA Divestment Party last summer. I know there's some sort of drying rack gadget that I picked up at a rummage sale that turned out not to work very well and that I should just throw out. And I think there are some plastic canisters that I don't currently use for bulk foods because they're the wrong size for the shelves where I keep such things. But I should move least-used appliances up there. And then pay attention to whether I actually use them at all.

The cabinet up above the microwave (over the range) is another trap for forgetting about things I don't use often. Because it's tall, it has things like the iced tea maker (which I hardly ever use) and tall thermoses, and a very large plastic funnel that I brought home when the lab was getting rid of unused surplus supplies. I mean, this is a BIG honkin' funnel. I forget what I've used it for, if at all. But you don't just throw that sort of thing away, right? (You can see why I have problems.)

Anyway, this is my process: pull everything out of a specific area, clean, decide what the best use for that area would be, move objects in, stare at the objects that used to be there and decide which area to clear next.

Yes, this is displacement activity. This is not something that Must Be Done Now. This is me taking control of my micro-environment in ways that make me happy.

And speaking environment, since tomorrow is trash day, I needed to do enough trimming to fill the green can (since my backyard activities haven't been producing waste). I was going to tackle the rosemary and lavender in the parking strip with the hedge trimmer, but it had been long enough since I last used it that the charge on the battery pack had drained away. So I did weeding instead. Weeding reminds me that my body is not young and spry, so I try to gauge carefully how much I can do without being sore later. Little by little will do the trick, as long as I can put those little bits in regularly.

We had our second DISTAFF weekly Zoom chat today, and I have another try at a video chat with Liz tomorrow morning before work (silly time zones) this time trying Zoom rather than Skype. And another video chat to organize. And I need to do another round of emails with my podcast interview prospects, with the scheduling options a bit more open since I'm home all day and can get my work hours in whenever. I need to come up with a better way to get interview appointments locked in. A lot of the drawn out process is my fault because I lose track of where the conversation is, but a lot of times I've said, "Hey, here's a bunch of possible dates, pick one and give me a time" and then I never hear back. It's hard to know whether people simply aren't that enthusiastic about being on the show or whether they're expecting me to simply pick a date and time arbitrarily. I love *having* the interviews but I don't love *scheduling* them. And speaking of which, I need to write up my script for next week's On the Shelf podcast and edit the interview...no, wait, I already edited the interview for the week after! Yay for Past Me!

Today I tackled pulling stuff out from the righthand side of the garage to clean, catalog, photograph, and organize for my "Yes, I'm ready to admit I'm not doing SCA any more" giveaway open house. Tents, beds, tables, kitchen furniture. I've moved the containers of smaller kitchen equipment into the house for more focused sorting and washing. There's also the Wall-O-Fabric and the craft supplies to go through.

I'm not getting rid of *everything*. I'm keeping enough basic mundane camping gear for the possibility that I'll load up the Element and head for the woods. And I'm keeping plenty of fabric and craft supplies to be happy. But I'm aiming for "right-sizing".

The hardest part of this process isn't the "stuff" itself, but the investment I put into making and adapting things for my "ideal medieval environment". Some of those things I only enjoyed a few times. Some were still in the process of being perfected. But here's the thing: I'm *not* using them. And I have no rational expectation of using them in the future. And I'd rather that someone else used them to help build *their* "ideal medieval environment" rather than having the stuff continue to collect dust in my garage.

There's been a recurring theme in my life of needing to distinguish between living the life I will truly enjoy, and trying to live a fantasy life that I only *want* to want. Let me unpack that. The example I usually use to illustrate this struggle is My Fantasy Canopy Bed.

When I was a little girl, I fantasized about the French Provincial Canopy Bed in the furniture ad insert of the Sunday paper. But I didn't just want the canopy bed as advertised, I wanted it with the full curtains around it, like I knew canopy beds were supposed to have. I knew I was never going to get one. I had a perfectly good bed and my family didn't buy fantasy furniture like that. At one point I improvised a sort of half-canopy using random lumber and extra sheets. The fantasy was the image of having a private, closed-off space that was mine and mine alone in the middle of the house.

And when I was an adult and I had a place of my own and was doing some redecorating, I thought very seriously about fulfilling my childhood dream of having a canopy bed with curtains. And I realized that it was silly. Because the entire *house* was my private close-off space that was mine and mine alone. The image of what I wanted a canopy bed for was no longer relevant.

I have a few other standard examples of figuring out the difference between wanting something that I'll genuinely enjoy and wanting a fantasy of something that I can never actually have. I keep running up against that with home improvements. I fantasized about building a backyard combination grill and open-fire-cooking setup so I could invite my SCA friends over for medieval barbeque parties. Um...so the fantasy part? The part where I invite bunches of friends over on a regular basis. Wasn't going to happen. Sorted that out in my head soon enough to avoid expense and trouble. I've had similar issues around fun kitchen equipment for cooking things that I'm not actually going to cook on a regular basis. (Ooh, wouldn't it be fun to make my own homemade pasta...now that I've deliberately cut way back on carbs in my diet.)

Anyway, a lot of my SCA camping gear was about putting together that fantasy ideal of the medieval campsite. I got pretty close. I had plans for getting even closer. But even at its best, that fantasy ideal involved spending massive amounts of time and physical effort to pack the vehicle, unpack, set up, organize, and then reverse the whole process less than 48 hours later. All for one waking period of trying to "live the medieval fantasy" (and here's the kicker) at events where "living the medieval fantasy" mostly involved going to *other* people's campsites. Well, anyway.

There's the SCA experience I *wanted* to want and enjoy. I got close to it a few times. And that dream is what I had to let go of to be willing to give my gear away. I hit apogee. It's behind now. Somewhere in my files are the sketches planning out my medieval camping canopy bed. With curtains. I never did make it. In a box somewhere I have the mock-up of the bed curtains done in a cheap fabric for proof-of-concept, but I never found the right balance between engineering, portability, and historic appearance for the structure itself. I'll be giving away my IKEA-hacked camping sideboard that was going to have a plate display rack added to the back. I completed the design. I bought the lumber and hardware. Never made the display rack.

That's what I'm letting go of: that gap between the dream and the accomplishment.

One of the projects I truly do mean to finish is a set of throw pillows decorated with pieces of half-finished lace and embroidery. Projects that never got the momentum for completion. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. Ou sont les neiges d'antan?

For a while there, I had a very productive, if grueling, writing schedule worked out. Wake up ca 5am, on the road before 6, in the coffee shop near work and write for 1.5-2 hours then be at work by 8. Write LHMP entries on my lunch hour. Off work at 5 (well, generally it slides to around 5:30 just because), gym workout and cleanup until almost 7pm when the traffic should have thinned out enough that I can get home by 7:40 or so, stuff something in my face and get clothes, lunch, and gym bag prepped for the next day, by which time it's close to 9pm and time for bed. Weekends are for everything else: yard work, housecleaning, shopping.

But that's the schedule for winter when there's no way in hell I'll be home during daylight so what's the rush to get there? Now that the days are getting longer and we've bumped over into daylight savings, there's the possibility of doing yard work on weeknights. So this is the proposed schedule: wake up ca 6:30am, on the bike to BART to bike to work hopefully by 8am. Do gym workout on lunch hour. Off work at 5 (I swear, 5 promptly, mostly), bike to BART to bike to home by 6pm which gives me at a minimum an hour of daylight to get some yard & garden stuff done, get inspired to actually cook from the garden and lay out clothes, lunch, gym bag, etc for the next day, by which time it's maybe 8pm. At which point I have, in theory, 2.5 hours before I need to be in bed which, in theory, will be spent on writing. In theory. In theory, there's also about a total of 1 hour on BART that can be spent either reading LHMP articles or writing on the iPad, but some of this depends on whether I get a seat or not, which is tricker with the bike.

Writing in the evening has proven to be less of a certain thing than writing in the morning. But writing in the morning is dependent on getting myself out of the house (because otherwise I'll just try to sleep longer) and that works if I'm driving but not if I'm biking. So I'm going to have to come up with some clear rituals to enforce writing time. (Later in the year, "write in the long twilight sitting in the garden" works, but that's not an option yet.) And now that I'm doing fiction in Scivener, I need to come up with some sort of system for drafting things in the iPad then transferring so I can write on BART. And how will I keep up with all the podcasts I've gotten used to following now that I won't be driving? (Except on Tuesdays, which are dragonboat days.)

I like rituals, but I also like shaking up my rituals and reorganizing them. The "write in the morning' change worked better than I expected. I still feel guilty about driving rather than BARTing (although the difference is cost isn't as much as you might think, since I'm only going to the east bay, not SF with all the bridge/parking foo). But I've really been looking forward to getting the bike back into the mix, and that necessarily means shaking up the writing rituals.

Emptied another file drawer. The "get rid of all but one filing cabinet" project is going forward no matter what happens on the real estate front. It's fascinating to contemplate the half-life of "important papers". Eventually, everything becomes obsolete and irrelevant. It's comforting, in a way, that decisions that may seem nerve-wracking today may be crystal clear in five years. There will be no more linguistics undergrads popping up in my in-box asking me to dig through my memory of their classwork in order to provide a recommendation letter. The receipts and presentation handouts from the conference in Paris are long since irrelevant. And, as previously noted, there's no point at all in saving the hard-copy printouts of my dissertation data when I have the original computer files. (Although it occasionally reminds me that I should at least leave the world the legacy of the tidied up database of Medieval Welsh preposition data.) On the other hand, I found some things stuffed into the file folders that had no business being treated as old reference materials (e.g., the commercial pattern for the Boksten Man's clothing that I bought back in '99 in Denmark). This is why I actually look through the files before tossing them in recycling.

My excessively-over-engineered integrated financial tracking database has passed its next test: rolling over to the new year. There are certain features built into the files that assume each year's data will get archived out of the working file. Well, ok, one is a feature and one is a bug. The cumulative budgeting figures (i.e., whether I'm on-target for the categories with a specific budgeted amount) work off a "total in-category divided by day-of-year" so there's an awkward period between the start of the new year and the point when the old data gets archived when a year-plus's expenses get divided by just the "plus" number of days. The bug is that some of the internal complexity of the files makes navigation start to get r---e-----a-----l-------l---------y slow as more and more records are added. For most data entry it doesn't cause problems, but when I want to review the running balance for one of the sub-accounts, I'd better have a solitaire game handy.

I haven't done the full end-of-year financial analysis yet, but I'm delighted to find that I stayed under all but one of my tracked budget categories. (The one I missed on was "office supplies". Not sure if I would have been on-target if I hadn't had to buy a new laptop. Also, I was on-target for "food" only if you combine the sub-categores "groceries" and "prepared food". I went under on the former and over on the latter, but only by small amounts.) Since the budget tracking is something I use as a reference reality-check, rather than having unbreakable set-asides, this means that I've internalized my budget targets sufficiently.

And I believe I have all the paperwork and data necessary to do my taxes! So that's a project for tomorrow.

Found a nice little compact 6-drawer cabinet for the new Art Supplies Home -- it even comes with casters. Moved the contents of the old, clunky art cabinet into their new home and meditated on the following:

* If you don't remember that you own something, you might as well not own it.
* If you no longer own a typewriter, you no longer need to own a box of EZ-erase typing paper and a folder of carbon paper.
* The note cards that were way too twee for you to use when you were in high school are no more appropriate when you're on the far side of 50.
* Felt markers have a finite lifespan. Assume they have passed it without testing them individually.
* Continuing to hang on to the Texas Instruments SR-50 calculator you got in '74 may increase your geek cred but is of no practical use. Particularly since it hasn't worked for the last 20 years.
* Oil paint tubes have a finite lifespan. Assume they have passed it unless you can remember when you bought them.
* If you don't remember that you own something, you might as well not own it.
* Construction paper is cheap. You don't need to keep pieces with writing on one side "because they're still good for stiffening something else".
* When you're more than 5 years out of grad school, go ahead and throw away those extra blue books and scantron forms.
* Stick-on sheet feeding labels have a finite lifespan. They are also cheap. You know what to do.
* In the 21st century, should an adult choose to do anything so retro as to write a letter on actual stationary, it is not suitable to use stationary with unicorns or dragons on it.
* If you don't remember that you own something, you might as well not own it.
* Standard graph paper has many uses; log-log graph paper has many fewer uses. Can you think of any that crossed your path in the last five years? That you couldn't plot much more easily in Excel?
* Glue-sticks have a finite lifespan. Keep only the newest.
* There is a limit to the number of #2 pencils and Bic stick pens a body is likely to use in a lifetime. Also: stick pens have a finite lifespan.
* If you don't remember that you own something, you might as well not own it.

(This post serves a dual function: I'm testing the DSL connection off a different phone jack.)

Back a few months ago, while poking around for entries in the geek-off challenge, I pulled two boxes down out of the attic that contain stuff dating back to my pre-college days. Boxes I hadn’t really examined in detail since things were put into them (although the specific physical boxes date to my days in San Jose in the early ‘80s). In searching through them for the items I was looking for, I came to the conclusion it was time to bring Life-cleaning principles into play. If I’m going to save stuff, it should be stuff that’s worth saving and ideally should be kept accessible. I did some initial discards back when I pulled the boxes down. (Mostly on the principle of “if I can’t even remember why this was important to save, it isn’t important”.) So it’s time for some additional sifting.

Discard: The “thanks for participating” trophy from the summer athletics program in 1970. The “thanks for participating” trophy from the science fair in 1973. The trophy for Division A 3rd place for the Horace Mann Jr. High Math Team from 1973. That one was actually for achieving something, but it’s gotten broken at some point, so into the discard pile. Hmm, and here’s the Division A 1st place trophy for the 1972 Math Team. Still in good shape. Does that mean I keep it? Why? What purpose would it serve? I’m pondering too long so it makes it to the next round. The souvenier paperweight from the Navel Electronics Lab for participating in the all-city physics competition. As I recall, I took first place, but the paperweight doesn’t say anything specifically about that, so no special attachment.

Further Discard: A pine-cone flower pin. A jingle-bell. Make that three jingle-bells. A stuffed penguin xmas ornament. (Why???) A blue braided cord. A little plastic mouse with a pin back. A charm bracelet that came pre-charmed. (It might be a keeper if the charms had been acquired individually for meaningful reasons.) A junky chain bracelet with a leprechaun on it. (Why???) A bracelet and choker necklace with small tumbled stones glued on them, dating from my acquisition of a rock tumbler. One earring, ditto. A pin with “afs” (American Field Service – the group that sponsored foreign students at our high school). A small junky heart-shaped locket on a chain set with a green plastic heart-shaped “stone”. No doubt a present from some relative at some point, but no sentimental attachment left. A hospital bracelet with my name on it, probably from when I had my broken pelvis.

Keep for now: The 1st place Mathematics medal from High School. Not sure whether this was an overall 1st or just for my year. The 1st place Chemistry medal for the Division 1 team for 1975 (my senior year). My CSF (?California Scholastic F-something?) lapel pin. My very first driver’s license. A mostly-empty diary with entries from 1975-1977, mostly 1975 covering the initial bits of the year in Germany (or rather, mostly covering the month of travel in Europe waiting for the house in Germany to be ready for us).

Further keep for now: A silver ring with a horses’s head on it, dating to the period when I was desperately trying to be horse-crazy (and failing miserably for a variety of reasons). A small chain with two carved slate pendants with Deep Personal Significance. A medium-sized abalone shell (because one never gets rid of abalone shells – it’s a rule). A child-sized bracelet with an engraved plaque saying “Phyllis” that must have been mom’s as a child. Two boxes of blown-glass animals that were handed over to me at some point when I could be trusted not to break (too many of) them. The mortarboard tassel from my U.C. Davis graduation.

Keep for further examination later: Three small boxes of assorted rocks and body parts. Yes, the contents are pretty much as bizarre as that sounds. (They also managed to get dumped all over the floor while moving furniture around to test the phone jack.) A plastic bag of assorted Meaningful Objects, mostly from the grade school era.

One box is now entirely emptied an the keepers consolidated into the second box. The second largely contains paper items: correspondence, school yearbooks, school pictures, my Baby Book. Most of this will be keepers, but will be put on shelves rather than returned to the attic.