"Spring" Cleaning

Well, its still feeling like Spring only off and on here, but according to the calendar, the season of flowers and new life is here. Now, my family has never done even an unofficial "Spring cleaning" - Mom is an incredible housekeeper, and if there was ever enough dirt in this house to warrant such a drastic measure, I think she would break down and cry. I however, am not an incredible housekeeper, even though my part of the house is only a very small bedroom. I consider it evidence of the creative that I am - others in the house consider it just a plain old mess, and sometimes a fire hazard. Either way, I have been in need of applying what organizational skills I have for a very long time. Enter the last few days...

It has occurred to me (rather unwillingly on my part) that I am leaving home in about 3 1/2 months. This has caused a number of things to happen (besides me freaking out), including a fairly extensive reorganization of my life. Shocking, I know! It has been way out of my comfort zone, but, being that type A, goal oriented person that I am, has also felt very good once I see that I'm accomplishing something. It also appears to have made the organized members of our family quite happy ;-).

First came my books. I love my books. My books are more important to me than my clothes - ok, that's not saying much coming from me, but you get the point. Our library has these shelves of books for about 50 cents that I have become almost addicted to, which means I literally had three stacks of books knee high on the floor of my room. My shelves (an entire seven foot bookcase) were a wreck, and it was time to purge and reorganize. Well, I made an Excel spreadsheet of all my books. The result was all of them organized by category and then author's last name all in one bookcase (except cookbooks) - I will admit, it is wonderful! Mom was extraordinarily happy that they were neat, Birdie's happy that she can find my fiction, and I'm happy that all my books look so happy on their shelves.

Then came the filing. I don't do filing. I do piling. Dad has been trying very hard to get me to stop that, because he used to and knows how important it is to not. His attempts didn't work, until it occurred to me that many of the random papers that were on almost every flat surface of my room need to go with me to school. [insert me having a 10 second freak session before surrendering myself to the inevitable] So, off to Office Depot we went, got two file boxes, returned home and I now have a filing system (that no one but me would understand, but hey, I'm the one that has to use it, right?) and a much cleaner room.

(Actually, the "off we went to Office Depot" wasn't quite so simple. First Dad and I went pawn shopping for a number of things, including a filing cabinet, and discovered you can't get a decent two-drawer for less than $90, which was out of our price range. Pawn shopping is one of the only experiences where you can be called both "babe" and "madam" by a sales clerk within an hour of each other, depending on which shop you're in... but I digress)

Anyhow, I am now off to clean out my clothes (many of which really need to be passed on to Birdie and SRM), desk drawers and CD's/Tapes. Yes, I mean cassette tapes, like the kind you listened too in the '80s and '90s - some of the best Christian rock ever recorded. I guess Spring cleaning - whether intended as such or not - isn't such a bad idea after all.