Rain, Rain, Go Away!

Seriously, I know that rain is good, but come on!! It seems like it has been raining for the last two weeks. Mushrooms are taking over my yard and my garden. I want to go outside and get some work done, but it is RAINING!! So for the last few weekends I have been working on decluttering our spare room. We are getting ready to set up the Gnomeslayer's bedroom, and we're going to have to do some rearranging of rooms. But before I can do that, the spare room had to be emptied out.

I have a confession to make. I come from a family of hoarders. When I was growing up, our room was always a terrible mess, because we were never made to get rid of anything. Most of the time our house was so messy we couldn't have people over. I grew up to be a cluttery adult, and it took a whole lot of embarassment and determination to break out of that cycle. I have swung to other extremes and am very much into the simplification movement. When Elaine St. James came out with her 101 Ways to Simplify Your Life book in the 90's I had an epiphany and learned how to control the things in my life instead of letting it control me.

So flash forward to now. After having the baby, we ended up moving a lot of the things out of the common areas to help with the child-proofing. Then I went through our big bookshelf and culled out about half of the books. They got moved into the spare room too, waiting to get taken to the library bookstore. Then I went through my closet and got rid of clothes that I didn't wear or were too small for me. They also went into the spare room to get taken away. Ditto for various knick-knacks that I have been lugging around with me for a long time, because someone gave them to me. I still had a unicorn blanket from when I was a teenager that I finally decided that I could let go of. There are a lot of things that I had, more out of habit than real desire to keep them. So I got it all bagged up yesterday, and this morning it got taken to the Salvation Army and donated. The SUV was packed full, and I couldn't believe that all of that stuff had come from our house. ;)

I've been watching the "Hoarders" show on A&E for the last few weeks. It reminds me a lot of when I was growing up. My grandpa was definately a hoarder. He had outbuildings stuffed full of cardboard and banding materials that he picked up from the local box factory. There were outbuildings full of discarded books that he brought home from the library. If he would have had the choice of this junk or his kids, I'm pretty sure that he would have chosen the junk. It's watching that show that made me even more determined that dysfunction not be passed along to my daughter. People in my family still suffer from obsessive hoarding. I haven't been in my mom's house for 8 years now, because of her obsessive animal hoarding and the environment there. So watching other people struggling through their problems helps give me ideas on what might help her. BTW, if you need any motivation at all to get up and do some housework, I strongly recommend watching that show (it isn't for the faint of heart sometimes). I haven't watched an episode yet that I didn't have to get up and declutter something or clean something in a commercial break. :) You can even watch episodes online here.

And just so this thread isn't too depressing, here are some pictures of my asters. They have been blooming like mad this week. :)