Letting go of books is one of the hardest tasks we’ve had to face. Books are very important to whole family and the idea of getting rid of them is counter-intuitive for us. But faced with boxes of books that have been in the back of a cupboard for close to twelve years, it’s a little difficult to justify holding on to them on the off chance we might need them. Who knew what was in those boxes anyway. So we passed many on to a good home and are working towards having every book on a shelf and accessible.

Of course none of this has stopped us acquiring more books.

She’s being far too generous when she says “We’re pack rats of the highest order” – the problem is arguably much more me then her. She can be wonderfully clear headed about these things (absolutely no sarcasm intended), where I’m terrible about throwing anything away. While part of the problem is that I always think “That might be useful someday.” (which I’ve conveniently rationalized into “WeatherGirl might be able to make art with that someday” so it’s not really my problem.), it’s much more this weird and misguided inner archivist. Surely someday in the future (maybe when Sub-Evil Boy is a famous actor) archivists and librarians will want to know every possible detail of our lives, so we can’t really throw away this important window in our remarkable lives! “I know I’ve never read that book, and probably never will, but isn’t it important that we own it?!?” Or not.

And she has to live with this bizarre behavior, as our lives and house continue to fill up with minutia and “history”. She’s slowly rehabilitating me, though, and I’m actually letting go of some things, including bags of books we donated to the UMM library in the fall. Oh, did that hurt, even though I’ll probably never actually miss a single one of them.

Now I need to take a bulldozer to my office (or burn it to the ground and start over)…