Changes

This is my last weekend on maternity leave, I start work again on Monday. I went in for a meeting yesterday, to try to get back in the swing and wean me off of my Quickbeam addiction. All of the visiting family are gone now, and so now I'm going to take advantage of the relative quiet to finish the main project that I set for myself to get done with all of my time at home. When we moved down here from North Carolina, we went through a major purge of our stuff. I mean major, like leaving half of our stuff behind. Over the last few weeks I have gone through my closet to get rid of the old clothes that I don't wear anymore, so there is some more stuff gone. The last two rat holes that we have left are in our guest room closet and our computer room closet. I was watching Clean Sweep this morning while I was feeding Quickbeam, and I got motivated to go ahead and conquer the clutter at last. That way I can start my working life back and Maw can start his stay-at-home-dad routine without having to be burdened with it.

So, my first project this morning was the spare room closet, since it has less stuff in it. I pulled everything out of the closet and put it in a pile. I sorted out the pile into sub-piles. Throw Away, Donate, Quilting Supplies, Knitting Supplies, Paperwork to Shred and Paperwork to File. I had to have a heart-to-heart talk with myself on a couple of topics:

• Quilting - With a new baby, working full time and taking college classes too, I don't have a lot of spare time. I am going to focus on quilting as my main craft of choice. I plan on starting attending guild meetings this month to get reinvigorated. I did a major purge of fabric that I am going to set aside into a bag and donate to the guild. I also took several UFO (Unfinished Objects) that I have had for years that I have had guilt over not finishing and threw them away. When I'm ready to start quilting again I want to start on something new and fresh, not something half-finished that I no longer care about. This is progress here. :)
• Knitting Supplies - Even though I enjoy knitting, it isn't high enough on my priority list to keep hoarding yarn and magazines for a craft that I am not going to be doing anytime soon. Verdict: All of the knitting items are going in a bag and I will see if there are any knitters at the guild that would be interested in it.
• Work Stuff - There are a few large binders of reference material for training courses that I had taken in my previous job. My idea was to take them to work and leave them there in my office, rather than leave them at home. But then in thinking about it, I'm not going to use them any more there than I would here, so I threw them away.
• Idea Book - One of the other things that I have been carting around with me forever are clippings from magazines with ideas for gardens and house ideas. I sorted through this stack harshly and am left with my very favorite ideas. I plan on compiling these into a binder so that I can keep them more organized. I'm going to prune out my stack of gardening magazines so that I can clear up some space in my bookshelf. Then I'm going to take the idea book and design a plan for our yard so I can take things from just being an idea on paper and actually do something with them.

The focus of this year is to stop hoarding up things and actually put them to use. Stop just talking about doing things and actually do them. Live life instead of putting things off. And for goodness sake, stop keeping piles of things in the house. ;)