Cleaning up

The clean up continues - my BFI dumpster is about half full. I've been working to a bit of a deadline to at least get the back porch cleaned out. I'm getting it tiled and painted so I've been running to the tile store and Totem and buying all sorts of odd things I'd never heard of before. I'm not doing the work - I've hired a friend, bless him, to do it. But I've been doing a bunch of the prep. Yuck.

As I've been sorting through stuff and figuring out what needs to go to the dumpster and what goes to recycling or the thrift store I've been struck by how much junk I have. Part of the problem is that we can get so much cheap stuff made in the third world with little regard to environmental or labour concerns. The temptation is always to buy four cheap things instead of buying one good quality thing. And more to the point, there is always the temptation to buy a new one when you can't find the one you have already.

I've also come to realize that I go through a lot of paper that I don't file and therefore could never find if I needed. I run off articles all the time thinking that this is of interest and that I might use it in a sermon or a class. But then it gets thrown in a pile where it languishes. So now I'm asking myself whether or not I will file an article before I run it off. Hope it helps.

Maggie Dawn has a great principle for getting rid of junk: would I pay to ship this across the country? Unfortunately I have. It was 23 boxes of books and papers and miscellaneous stuff I had stored in friends' basement. After I went through it several years after I had paid to bring it here I found that there was little that I actually wanted or needed in the boxes.

So I was really preaching to myself last Sunday (see below). Now I just have to listen to myself!