I have a new approach now.  I am still doing one room at a time, but  I am clearing the decks of everything that is not absolutely necessary to live day to day, which of course makes me wonder why I keep any of it at all, but of course life will begin again once we move.  It also makes me hope that my next home will have some of those floor to ceiling built in bookcases where I can just put my little momentos instead of having them strewn around on this table and that table.

I went through my dollhouse stuff.  I am giving away a bunch of building materials, as I will be only doing room boxes from now on.  Roomboxes take the place of a full dollhouse and allow me to play with my furniture and stuff without the work and space of a dollhouse.  What I am discovering about myself is that I am becoming more realistic about the time I have for all my various hobbies.  Because I have so many interests I realize it is not possible to be a full time dollhouse hobbyist, so a roombox here and a roombox there to display my little furniture will be as good as it gets in this lifetime.   I had a wonderful time building my first dollhouse but indeed it took me several years.  I don’t think I want to spend another several years making another one.  So off it goes – the paint, the windows, the doors, the endless supply of wood.

How life has changed in twenty years.  Boxes of AAA maps get thrown in the recycling, except SoCal maps that I will use just to get oriented spatially.  We find our way from here to there through online maps now.  No more worries about how to fold the map back up. I saw a comedienne once who said if you wanted to torture her father just tie him to a wall and make him watch you fold a map up the wrong way lol!  We all know people like that – you might even be that person yourself! – and the days of those kinds of arguments on road trips are all but over.

The process of purging is an interesting one, in that I may decide to keep something today in a moment of sentimentality, yet when I look at it again tomorrow I’ve had my moment and out it goes.  The benchmark for me is: will this be more useful to someone walking through a thrift shop or to me when the grandchildren come to visit.  I am still getting used to the idea of measuring everything against whether it will be entertaining to the grandchildren.  There are none in the near future but as we all know, the far future becomes the near future before we know it.  I am still looking on eBay to see waht things are worth but generally something that I think should be worth something and then it isn’t, either gets donated or I keep it.  My massage table, for instance is $300 firm (it really should be $400) and if no one wants it for that, I’m keeping it.  So there.

So now there are quite a few more boxes packed than two days ago.  The process is on hold again for work, but I look forward to finishing the first layer so I can relax and enjoy the holidays and then begin again in earnest after that.  I’m getting close, and with each box that gets tucked away in a corner it all becomes more real.

We are moving.