Sentimental Inventory

With the holidays behind us, we are full speed ahead on our mission to get ready for fulltiming. There is so much to do this month it makes our heads spin. But, it's all good.

One of our first to-dos is to "put away" Christmas. We didn't get much stuff out for our last "stick and brick" Christmas, sad to say. A day or two before Christmas we hung a wreath I made years ago over the fireplace and we managed to pull out our little
allegedly 6-foot artifical tree that we bought the week before Christmas 10 years ago for less than 10 bucks because we were too tired to lug our 12-foot monster tree out of the basement and decorate it.

You see, many things -- especially holiday things -- have a story behind them.

Well, last night I pulled the final plug on that little tree and, I must admit, I got a little sentimental. (So sentimental, in fact, I took pictures of the scrawny little thing.) We'll take that tree down tomorrow or the next day and put it out with the trash. Then, we'll go through our collection of ornaments and decide what to keep and toss. Most will go. A few sentimental favorites will go to storage. Each and every one of them will have a story that we will treasure.

Tonight, we embarked on another chapter of our household inventory project. We're making a list of all of our household possessions, room by room, and will soon decide what we'll keep, store, trash or give away. Tonight we tackled the kitchen. In just under an hour we moved from cabinet to cabinet and made note of what was in each. Tucked away in dark crevices we found presents from Christmases past, wedding gifts and some stuff either one of us never knew we had. Each of them had a story.

We're pleased to report that during this process there were more than a few things that we immediately decided to toss. So, Boris is feeling particularly satisfied with this project as it met his minimum daily requirement for 2009: to throw something away every day.

Eventually, we'll decide what to do with it all. It's all part of the process. But, today it's been a sentimental inventory.