Too Many Monkeys In My Hard Drive

There is nothing like that little message that pops up to tell me that my hard drive is almost full to make me clean out my computer clutter.  I thought there must be some reason that my computer is conspiring against me, so I took Polly to the Apple store.  They informed me that my music and pictures were taking up one-third of my space.  Even though I have a back-up hard drive, I poised myself for some hard-line discipline and resolved to clean things out.

I started around Christmas with cleaning out emails and managed to clean out about 500 or so.  Isn't it hard to delete emails from friends?  They are long catch-up type messages and they make me laugh every time, so I'm avoiding those for now.  What really happens more than not is just time going by and forgetting to delete the junk so it keeps accumulating. Normally I wouldn't care but I have serious computer issues so I must push forward.

In order to prevent this massive build-up again, I have been ruthlessly unsubscribing from companies.  Some of them are sending emails so often that I'm not really reading them.  Williams Sonoma has started really creeping me out with their emails.  If I go visit their site to look at something, they will send me an email a couple of days later saying, "Thank you for looking at our Cuisinart Food Processor."  What?  I really don't like being internet stalked.  Talk about nosy!

Photos were my next line of attack and they give the most satisfaction in creating more hard drive space.  I didn't know how massive these photo and video files were.  If you are having this issue too, go straight for the jugular, the photos.  On first pass through over 6000 photos, I've managed to delete almost 1000!  I've come to realize that I need to practice responsible photography in the future.  How many pictures of a monkey's face in Costa Rica do I need?

What about you guys?  Are you email and photo hoarding like me?  I'm mostly just too lazy to take the time to go through these things until it's too late.  What do you need to sort through before you run out of space in your computer or elsewhere?

Corral Your Family Board Games

What have I been up to since January 1?  I've been redecorating and reorganizing all over the place, and now I'm here to tell about it!  I've been tacking little projects by doing something that I usually wait until the last possible moment to do, buy more stuff, whether it's organizing stuff or not.

I always think that if I have to go buy a box to hold stuff that those things must be clutter and I must ignore them until they go away.  They don't always go away.  They are shameful like that, clutter I mean.  So sometimes you have to corral your stuff so it can have a place to live and be respectable and no longer call itself clutter.

Since our extra family moved in last August, we've been playing a lot of board games and they were inadvertently being left out on the table until next time, dot dot dot.  That seems fine, but I hated them just lying there on the table until the next time.  So I set about finding a perfect new home for them which wouldn't be high up in the upstairs closet and also wouldn't be on the dining room table.  

I scoured TJ Maxx and Home Goods and Target a few times before finding this perfectly damaged but suitable and fortunately marked down gem.  Now our games have a place to live and they are handily stored in a convenient place for game-time at a moment's notice.

This is  my (im)perfect basket that only has one handle functional until I fix the other one. 

Ok, so it's not the deal of the century but have you noticed how expensive baskets are?  It's ridiculous really when you see the walls of baskets at Goodwill and other thrift stores. Unfortunately I never found one just the right size there, or I would have scooped it up.

Below is the final product, before I snipped the tag off.  I don't have a Minnie Pearl complex, I promise, however if you walked through my house right now you'd see lots of price tags dangling as I decide if I'll keep something or not.  That's the fun of redecorating and don't think I haven't realized that half of my errands are buying things and the other half are returning them.  I'm so productive!

This is the finished product, tucked away on the bottom of our little tower in the living room just waiting to be put to service again soon.  Don't you feel better knowing that our games have a home?

What about you all?  Do you have some things gathering that you need to go ahead make a permanent home somewhere?  Having like items together makes us feel more organized and it looks nicer too.  The great thing about finding a home for things is that sometimes you can just look around your home and find something that you already have.  I love it when I don't have to spend any money for a solution to an organizing problem.