Aaaahhh..... (my sigh of relief)

On Tuesday, I took my second truckload of clutter over to my friend's garage for our upcoming garage sale.  (Thanks, Morgan, for all your help.)  I never would have guessed we had two truckloads of stuff we didn't need stashed around our apartment.  There's not a huge difference in how things look in our apartment but it feels lighter to me.  I feel more relaxed now.  The decluttering is slowing down a bit for the moment.  I think I did too much too quickly and I'm kind of burnt out but I still have two boxes in my bedroom (one for the garage sale and one for Goodwill) that I will occasionally add to until they're full.  Yesterday, I decided to look at some of my sentimental clutter.  I've already gone through most of this stuff once but I ignored some of it so I decided to revisit this area.

I keep all of my sentimental stuff in a wooden chest (like a hope chest).  A few months ago, all of my stuff wouldn't even fit in the chest but now everything is in there and it's not even full anymore.  I had some t-shirts in there that I was saving but I took them out and my friend is making a small quilt with them that I can put on Julian's bed.  So I didn't really get rid of them but this way, they'll be useful instead of just taking up space.  In the chest, I have two boxes of photos.  One is from our wedding and the other is all other photos from my life before I got a digital camera.  I'm not doing anything with these because I feel that it's a reasonable amount and they're organized in the boxes.  My wedding dress is also in the chest and it takes up very little space. It's wrapped in tissue and rolled up in a travel shoe bag. 

The things I really need to deal with are the paper items.  The ones I decided to address first were yearbooks.  I had 8 yearbooks, 4 from my own high school years and 4 from when I was teaching high school.  That seemed pretty excessive to me.  I looked through the yearbooks from my freshman and sophomore years in HS and decided they could go (I scanned about 5 pages that were meaningful to me).  The yearbook from the last school I worked at instantly went to the recycling bin (it had no special meaning for me and was a complete waste of $50).  I'm also going to get rid of the one from the first school where I taught.  It has a few special memories but I'll scan those pages and I won't miss it. 

For now, I'm keeping the other four yearbooks.  I'm finding that the farther I get away from my high school years, the less important those memories are but I think it would be sad if my kids didn't see anything from those years (I don't have a lot of photos).  I taught at another school for two years which were two of the best years of my life (when I lived in Korea, met my husband and made some great friends).  Those yearbooks document some great memories and they'll be sticking around. 

I've also been tackling my digital clutter this week.  I deleted close to 3000 emails this week and got rid of most of the folders in my email accounts (yes, I have several but that's something for another day).  I signed up for an internet backup service last week because we've had too many computer problems in the last few months and I wanted all of our pictures, music, etc saved in a more secure location so I wouldn't have to worry anymore.  We're trying to go digital for most of our paperwork, music, and photos so I especially wanted the backup if we don't actually have the physical copies anymore.  I've been going through a lot of folders on my computer and deleting the old files and blurry photos that I've never dealt with.  It's going to take a long time to get through everything but I feel like I've gotten a good start. 

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