This is the fourth post in my series on my new long-term goals. Go here to see the first post in the series.

As I shared when I announced my diagnosis, my house is a constant reminder of the true cost of my illness. I was recuperating from major surgery when I moved into this house and I have not had a healthy year in the almost twenty years that I have lived here. It is all pretty amazing when you think about it.

There has been movement, my library has moved twice I think. My closet used to be the junk room. And now my old office plus half my new office serves that role. I use to store things in the basement after I stopped renting it out, but that stopped when I turned it into a temple and classroom. So most things are stored upstairs.

In the mean time, all my artwork, at least the ones that survived the floods, lives in my offices, old and new. When I retired after twenty five years, my ton of belongings including a library of technical books and archives was moved in boxes into the old office which was already holding the remnants from previous schools, organizations, churches and homes.

Each year, people would help me clean up for New Years by moving boxes of unopened mail to joined the unexamined boxes from previous years. The funny bit is that my filing cabinet is buried under a ton of boxes, so the paper just piles up waiting for that day when I am full of enough energy to tackle it. And of course that day never comes. People have offered to help but most only want me to throw everything out which freaks me out.

On top of the clutter is the constant fix it litany of any 100-year-old house. My dream of new windows went out the window after the ironically named hurricane and her sis, Rita. That is when I discovered what my insurance does not cover. Subsequent house woes were chronicled in Live Journal, which I will not repeat here except to say – DA-AMN!

This is all a long way of saying that de-cluttering and reorganizing my house has been a goal of mine for over fifteen years. And despite having thrown out a literal ton of stuff over the years, I have at least half of that left that needs organizing. I have had some areas of the house repaired, made some necessary changes and upgraded some elements. But it still feels like a ton of work is needed.

So my goals in this area include cleaning, sorting and organizing (what I call CSO), clutter removal, and setting up some household routines. Of the three, the household routines are mostly in place. On my balance score sheet, I reserve the highest score for de-cluttering and publishing. I am trying to see if this will motivate me. In the past two months, I managed two de-cluttering sessions. On one hand, it is a pretty miserable result. On the other hand, It is two more than I did all last year. This one is definitely a work in progress.

Next up is my last overall goal of sharing my message.

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