84.

Sweet success.

My "purging project" is often a topic of my blog. I'm sorry if it gets old - but it's what's happening when I'm unemployed and back at home.

I've made some insane progress in the two+ weeks that I've been home. In. Sane. We're talking emptying whole boxes in my closet. We're talking selling the extra-cushy and not-so-desirable margins of my yarn stash on craigslist. We're talking emptying two whole rubbermaids from under my bed. Insane.

But I don't think that any of that equals the amazing feat I pulled off today. It's something that I had every intention of tackling the last time I was home, but ran out of the steam I needed to even think about getting it done. It's something that's been haunting me for years and years: the basement filing cabinet.

It all starts at the beginning: I've always been a saver of everything useless. (You never know when you might need the assignment you did on the abrahamic covenant in the third grade!) At some point it became apparent (I think in middle school, more or less) that the vast portion of my clutter was paper, mostly falling into the categories of either school or art. So, in order to save my sister from being drowned in paper as my stuff continued to overwhelm our "shared" room, Dad gave me one drawer in the basement filing cabinet. I sorted all my papers into little manila folders. Then added more. And more. A third category of creative writing was added. And then the one drawer became two. It's true: I went through all my middle school papers and many of my elementary papers sometime between now and then. But it didn't do much good on the grand scheme of things. Barely made a dent, really.

Well, that all ended today. I rolled up my sleeves and laid all of my manila folders on the basement floor, stretching from one wall to the other in 21 piles of 5 or more. I plugged in my boombox and picked the first of my day's selection of cds, started up the tunage, and began my work. A trash can, a double-wide crate for recycling, an eraser and a pencil were my tools. I sorted through everything, and quickly learned two rules for sorting through my high school papers: 1) if it's from an English class (or something similar), take time to sort through the prosaic assignments and the unique, creative pieces of writing. Toss the former, save the latter; 2) if it's not from an English class (or something similar), take time to find and remove all the staples, pieces of tape, or other strange things, then toss.

I worked from a little before 10:00 until 11:00 (when I took my Price Is Right/Lunch break), from 11:45-13:00 (when I took my bike ride break), 15:30 to 17:30 (when I took my supper break), and from 18:30 to 17:30 - when I finished. Quite a day's work. I successfully sorted through all my folders, from "English 9" to "Church Bulletin Art (General)" (not sure why the "general" was included - there wasn't another church bulletin art folder), from "SPAN 2010" to the scarily mysterious "Other" folder. At the end of the day, I had a slightly full trashcan, I had maxed out the carrying capacity of the double-wide "recycle" crate, and I had down-sized from two jam-packed file drawers to one, half-full drawer.

The final toll: two shoe boxes of random stuff emptied; 84 manila folders completely emptied.