I didn’t want to ring in the new year from home. I wanted to spend the new year in California, but that didn’t work out. So I’m in Texas.

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been making the most of my time here to prepare for the shift in the calendar, which I am willing to be a shift in my life.

I’m cleaning out closets and drawers and getting rid of stuff. Last night, I cleaned out my coat closet and found that I have more saved gift bags than I could possibly use in five years. Please, friends, if you need a gift bag for any occasion, don’t buy one. Come pick from my stash! I also found games and puzzles I had forgotten I had. (Scrabble, anyone?) I’ve thinned out the contents of the closet, so now I can see everything that’s in there. How satisfying to turn chaos into order.

But I have more to do.

For a year and a half, I’ve had boxes in my living room and home office of things I brought home from the last “permanent” office I had. When I left that job and moved my things home, I found a new position right away, but the new position was supposed to be a temporary position – three months of covering for someone on maternity leave – so I never moved all my boxes into my new office. Here I am still working at that “temporary” position, and those boxes still sit in my home.

I thought about finally taking the boxes to the office and unpacking them, but I figured that if I hadn’t used the contents of the boxes in the last seventeen months, I probably didn’t need to keep what’s in them. Since I’ve started sifting through them, I’m largely discovering that I was right. It’s a bunch of stuff I don’t need or want. Purging them has been a wonderful exercise.

I’ve dealt with the boxes in my living room, but I still need to tackle those in my office. The office is actually quite a chore, even beyond the boxes. This is how it currently looks: