The cleaning isn't going well

I know, I say that all the time, but somehow it seems a bit more frustrating this week.

A week or so ago I got a bag of clothes together for donation. It is gone. Great. And I was going to get another bag together this week. Going to try on all those pants and get rid of those that are too small and most of those that are too big. You need some stuff that is too big and too small unless you have some weight gain or loss, but just some, not this much stuff. So, I was going through all of the old jeans, and there wasn't so much as I had imagined. Maybe I got rid of them last year and forgot. Anyway, most of them still fit, and I put most of them back, except that I decided one pair was too frayed and then I made cut-offs of two other pair. There's only really three or four pair that I wear on a regular basis, but I will eventually have to retire the gardening clothes.

The rest of the sorting is hard. I imagine that I want to get rid of a lot of stuff, only my reaction instead is more like--oh, I've been looking for that. I'm sure that I'll be looking for it again, as it still isn't stored in a good place.

And then I found more jeans. Okay, so I hadn't gotten rid of them, I'd just put them aside in case I needed them. I decided that I didn't need them. I had to try them on just to make sure, but now I am sure, and out they go. So I will have another bag of clothes for Goodwill, but it still doesn't seem to have made much of a dent.

It isn't that this is actually more physical work than gardening, it's just less rewarding. If you do a lot of hard work and dig a new garden bed, you end up with a new garden bed and all sorts of possibilities as you think about what you might grow in it. Sorting clothes is different. You start out with a big pile of clothes that maybe doesn't look so good on you, and you sort through the clothes and wash the clothes and try on the clothes, and then you end up with a slightly smaller pile of clothes that probably still doesn't look so good on you.

Okay, I have emptied two boxes. One contained things that will now go back in their proper places (such as the kitchen), and one contained things that reminded me of something that used to make me happy. I've had them in a box for four years, thinking that they might make me happy again and I would feel terrible if I threw them away, but no, they still do not make me happy. Time for them to go. I guess I just need to figure out where they need to go, as it still seems a waste to actually through them away, but I'm going to get upset if I see them somewhere like at the Goodwill.

I have finally convinced myself to part with some of my records. I've kept my LPs all this time. In the back room, I have a record player that probably still works, and I probably know how to fix it's main problem if it does not work. But I so rarely get it out and use it. I'm not sure that I've used it since we moved to this house. And, after one of the floods, the album covers were ruined. So I've now convinced myself that most of the records should go (probably straight into the trash since most of the covers are ruined, and I think that might be a major reason that a person would still want an LP is to look at the album cover), and that I will keep mostly the soundtracks and a few others that would be hard to find. The rest are just songs, and if I get to a point when I want to hear songs again I'll buy CDs or download them or whatever people do at the time. But I've not wanted to hear songs for about four years now. They all remind me of something.

So, a bag of clothes gone (in addition to the one I got rid of a couple of weeks ago), two boxes gone, and about half a shelf of records gone. And still, it just doesn't make that much difference. There is still all this stuff to deal with. I'm making a big mess trying to do something constructive, and I don't even know why, since I think that I have done a lot of this recently and shouldn't be doing it again so soon.

But there is still a room full of stuff, so I guess that it does need to be done.