Today was a smorgasbord of downsize activities. With so much to plow through, I thought it might be easier to hop around from one task to the next. A little variety to keep things interesting… and to keep me from getting bogged down in over-thinking the “what stays and what goes” decisions. So here’s a quick summary:

• Clothes: We got rid of our oldest boy’s outgrown clothes; he had the lightest wardrobe to begin with so we managed to get out of his room with just one additional bag of donation goods.
• Papers: I “discovered” a treasure-trove of junk paper in a small telephone table that stands at the foot of the stairs: old take-out menus, random receipts and mail order catalogs, graded homework assignments, etc, etc. It all went into recycling.
• Toys: On one of my trips down to the basement, I noticed a bag of dirt-covered stuffed animals; our dog has a bad habit of grabbing things in his mouth before he bolts out the back door. I put them through a wash and dry, and then loaded them into a donation bag. Then I dragged the bag upstairs to our daughter’s room and filled it to maximum capacity with other stuffed animals.
• Books: I dragged out a big stack of my wife’s old books–mostly grad school books and work-related titles. We cleared out a bunch, which are now by the front door waiting to be hauled off to the used book store. I managed to cull out another dozen or so books from my own books as well to add to the stack that’s heading out the front door.
• Packing: After all the culling and sorting of books over the past three months, we are just about at the point where everything else will end up coming with us. And today: I packed up our first four boxes of books that will go into storage. Now we have our first entirely clear bookshelf in the house–the same one that I started on when I began this whole book purge.

I also managed to get to the gym for a couple of hours and cook a decent dinner. There may even have been a little bit of video game play mixed in there as well.

That may not sound like a relaxing Memorial Day, and it certainly wasn’t mono-tasking, but it was absolutely the best way I could think of to spend the day. We plowed through a lot, but at no point was I feeling overwhelmed or dragged down.