Today was day four - I was too exhausted and in too much pain to post last night - fell asleep early after taking pain meds and letting my husband massage a massive knot out of my calf muscle.

Day 3 went fairly well, got a lot of stuff sorted - most everything in the living room.  Joe and I had homework to do - sorting papers and such.. we got some of it done - got it down from five bins to three.  I gave up a lot of things I thought I'd never be able to part with... But they are just things... I can live without those things.

Day 4, Joe took the day off work.  Time was split between the guest room, where Joe's office is, and the dining room.  The wonderful team from OrganizeThis stripped out the hutch and bookcase in the dining room, and lots of crap and old clothes out of the guest room.  Joe was here and was able to identify a lot of the stuff I couldn't.  I parted with my grandmother's china and my mother's crystal.  Hard, but not my style.  There is absolutely no reason for me to be burdened with these things just because someone else treasured them.  Let someone else learn to treasure them.... I am free.

And of course that means I can finally buy my own crystal if I want any... Have to think about that... I have wine glasses from our wine tasting trips... We don't do much formal entertaining, and aren't likely to in the future, so is there a point to it.. just more stuff to take care of that we don't use much.  Maybe I'll just stick with what I have... Regardless, I'm really starting to feel relieved of the weight of this stuff...

Probably harder than the china and the crystal, while we waited for the team to be ready for our participation, Joe and I went upstairs and culled a lot of books from our collection.  We have a huge collection of books upstairs in the library, but so many of them are outdated, or more easily replaced with information on the internet.  Joe and I are both savvy enough to avoid being duped by misinformation on the net, so why keep outdated textbooks, references and encyclopedias.  6 bins of books gone to the library for their fundraising sale.  Tonight we will load up another truckload for delivery tomorrow.  We actually have space on our shelves for the books that have been piling up off shelves and maybe even the occasional new book!  Wow... that's new.

I thought it would be traumatic to part with books... We are both such inveterate bibliophiles.  It seemed sacrilegious to part with a book, even a bad one.  I'm over that now... I don't think I'll keep any books I don't love anymore.  Now, true, we parted with almost no fantasy or science fiction books, but I think that will come in time too... maybe tonight?  We'll see.. those will be the hardest to part with.  Then again, we do re-read some of them from time to time.

They left us with a HUGE amount of homework for the weekend, and I'm sure we won't finish it all, but we'll make an effort..   I know it's SUCH a cliche, but 'it is what it is'.  Can't do more than we can do in limited time over two days... we already have a full weekend without the homework.

Anyway - I'm terrified of Monday - probably get to the master bedroom on Monday, unless we work in the garage again.  We're supposed to be down under three digit temperatures after Sunday, so it might be tolerable to be outdoors.  We shall see, the meteorologists have been damned inaccurate lately.  Mid-eighties (the prediction for Mon & Tues) would be a nice change, mid-seventies (Weds & Thurs) should be even better.

What I'm really looking forward to is sweater weather... we get damned little enough of it in So Cal.  Would be nice to have a chilly Halloween for a change.

Oh, my... a Halloween where I'm not embarassed to answer the door!  What a novel concept...