A new year is looming – and January must be get organized month, because the stores are filling the aisles with totes and plastic organizers that you can cram all your stuff into. I kind of chuckle at the clever marketing of this. As the Christmas shopping winds down and the displays get smaller, the toys and boxes of chocolate are replaced by the totes that organize your holiday stuff – round bins for wreathes, special dividers to keep your tree ornaments organized, the tall skinny ones that hold your rolls of wrapping paper upright, then we get into the sweater holders, and the big truck sized ones for all of that other stuff. Is this why houses are getting bigger; to accommodate the things that spend the majority of the year in containers and cardboard boxes of one sort or another?
When I moved last fall, the movers were grumbling about how much stuff that I have. I finally had to tell them to stop whining and just get on with it. I think that a big part of the problem was that, although I can get rid of most things with no difficulty, I do hang on to my books. Not the books I have written of course – those I want to sell and get out to the world at large. It’s the books that I collect that become rather heavy when packed into a small box. I remember reading somewhere (!), that Sagittarians are known for being readers and surrounding themselves with books. I wouldn’t say that I am surrounded exactly, and I did do a major trimming down a couple of years ago including relieving myself of a lot of textbooks and non-fiction work related to finishing my PhD. I do still have a lot of books though. They are kind of spread through the flat, but if you were to stack them all together, well, there’d be a few. And I like reading in bed into the wee hours, so reading stuff off my laptop is just not convenient. This proclivity for books is not just mine either. My 20-year old daughter has a collection that is just about busting the seams of her room. She loves to read, and once she discovers an author, she likes to read a lot of their stuff. A friend of mine at university created her own bookshelves by stacking bricks she liberated from a construction site, laying a plank on top of them for a shelf, stacking more bricks, another plank. That bookshelf was sturdy as could be, despite the absence of screws or nails.
So, although the stores will do their best to sell me a bunch of totes, I do not need any. In fact, things are pretty well organized around here right now. There will be a little re-configuring when oldest daughter moves in a couple of weeks, but nothing really major. Hmm, nothing to organize. No excuses for procrastinating. Must be time to get back to work on that book.
P.S. I still have copies of
Wake Up Women BE if you’d like to order a signed copy for you or perhaps some fantastic person that you know.
Posts
