Yes, it's me again

See, I told you I'd post more often this year! Aren't I good?

I'm sitting in my study, which for the last month has been ground zero for Operation Christmas Madness. Today I spent several hours putting it to rights while the boys were as lazy as they could possibly be, tomorrow being the first day of the spring term. None of us is ready to go back--or at the very least, none of us is ready to get up at the crack of dawn tomorrow morning. It won't be pretty.

My study is a small, upstairs bedroom that for the most part serves as a storage area for my books and papers, though I'm thinking about making it my actual work space. Normally I write on the living room couch, Travis by my side, but after a very serious effort at finishing a draft in November, many hours a day spent hunched over my MacBook, my back protests at the very thought of sitting anywhere other than a proper chair at a proper desk. As it happens, my study has one of each--a chair and a desk--plus a comfy club chair on loan from my friend Danielle if I need to kick back.

I should take a picture of my desk, which I'm quite fond of, even if I don't ever work there. It has cubby holes where I put my mail--such as it is--and other bits of paper that I collect. Today I went through all the cubbies and sorted and recycled and generally made my desk look like the place where a girl could sit each morning and peck happily away at her computer. Sadly, I did not get to the drawers, which are filled to the brim with decisions to be made--should this paper be saved? Recycled?  Shredded? I try to be ruthless, but it's so hard.

Next up is the study closet, which is jammed with all sorts of nonsense, including several half-finished sweaters and lots of yarn ("wool" to you UK gals) that I will never actually use but don't know what to do with. I feel like my whole house if filled to the brim with things that we don't use but I don't actually know what to do with. That would describe 95% of the stuff in my attic. It's the figuring out the proper disposal which puts the kink in the system. I wish I felt okay about just dumping all of Will's Star Wars figurines and all the plastic flotsam and jetsam he's collected over the past five or six years. But I feel I should re-purpose it somehow. In fact, one idea I've had is to systematically box up every bit of junk--here's a box of Star Wars figures, here's a box of plastic building blocks--and then sell the boxes at a yard sale, cheap. One buck a box of fun stuff your kid will love. My guess is there are lots of families with little kids who would eat this stuff up. Food for thought ...

I know, I know, I've mentioned my attic, and now you're all snickering. "Oh, here she goes again, like she's ever going to get that attic cleaned out." But I proclaim that 2013 will be The Year of the Attic. My friend Amy has offered to help me with it in exchange for quilting lessons, and I might just take her up on it. I need to purge! I want to get rid of stuff and then--and here's the big thing--not replace it. You may say I'm a dreamer, but I say, Watch this space. It will happen, ladies. It's only a matter of time.