Oh dear! We missed August.

Tragic when one forgets a whole month, isn't it? I did, however, have a good excuse: work.

Life's been busy here in my neck of the woods but all-in-all things are going well. August brought with it the standard-issue chaos of orientation and the start of the school year. In addition, the Cap'n and I worked feverishly on our "remodel" during which we re-vamped (read: got rid of all the old college furniture) our spare room/office. It looks just dandy now and we've moved on to our bedroom. We've got new end stands and a big-kid dresser! Next, is a face lift for the bed and bath. Bit by bit we'll get it all done and I can't wait! Our goal (well, my goal, but he's pretty easy-going...so his goal, too) is to have the whole house done by the end of the calendar year. I'll post pictures when we've completed the whole project. Or, you can visit my Facebook site to get a sneak-peak at the spare room.

It has been fun to purge the old stuff and subsequently pick things that are truly "ours" both in style and ownership. It has also been cathartic to clean out so much of the stuff we've amassed over the last 11 years that we neither need nor want (no offense mom, those window clings from 1999 were FAB at the time, I just don't think Pooh Bear sliding on a snowflake says "We're adults without kids").


So: we purged, and purged, and purged...and are even still purging. I swear, I'm not a pack rat. And yet still, I have spent hours sorting through stacks of cards, notes, pictures, movie stubs, binders of notes from not 1, not 2, not 3 but 4 degrees, stuffed animals, costumes, scrap book supplies, decorations, and (for reasons unknown to me) an entire box of beige and cream tap-top curtains.

Now that we've purged, however, I've run into a bit of a dilemma as to where to keep the things that "don't go" in the house. For any Friends fans out there, you'll relate to the fact that the closet in which all-of-the-above resided was very similar to Monica's closet in which she put all the things that didn't "go" or couldn't be organized into another place in her apartment. The Cap'n used to refer to this closet as "purgatory" a place were things would go to live for a while before we'd either throw them out or find a place to keep them permanently.

And, over time we not-so-lovingly dubbed this closet the "high emotion closet". Why? Well, because venturing into the closet for even the most simple of tasks (e.g., getting a greeting card) would inevitably result in needing to nearly unpack the whole damn thing just to get to what ever it was you were there for in the first place. Over time I eventually began to avoid the closet. I even refused to decorate for Christmas the last 2 years because it would require unpacking and re-packing the closet. Ridiculous? I think so!

The problem with making the high-emotion closet a more pleasant place to be is that I have now lost my fall back spot to shove stuff that I don't know what to do with. For example: the Cap'n's trophy from the annual high-school-friends golf tournament. Where the hell does that live now? I'm tempted to put it in a neatly labeled box that reads: Trophies. But, more fittingly it should really just read "trophy" as that is our only one. My best solution? "Take it to the office!"

Happy reading!

~Phoenix