Fellow blogger and friend, Jane Fritz recently offered a post that was a ‘challenge;’ a February Decluttering Challenge. Her post urged me into the bowels of my cluttered office to meet that challenge. This led me on a two week pilgrimage to tackle the mess and find some stuff that was missing and vital to my existence.
In all honesty and in consideration of Jane and her wonderful post, it was NOT the number one reason I donned a dust mask, rubber gloves and a snorkel to meet the office challenge. By the way, locating masks and gloves are no big deal these days. With COVID still dangling around our necks (along with a mask) we have those things instantly available. So I got all dressed up to tackle the office NOT just because of Jane’s post, although it DID strongly nudge me in that direction. There were two OTHER reasons that I vowed to begin and complete the office decluttering challenge with the utmost haste.
I have a leather credit card holder that stays in my office at the back of that slidy shelf that holds the computer keyboard. I keep it there because it holds the only credit card I use for ordering stuff on-line and it’s handy when I need it. My original Social Security card is in that leather card holder as is my nurse’s license and some other stuff I don’t like to carry around in my purse. Sometimes the card holder falls off the slidy shelf and ends up under the desk behind my printer.
My husband got me a new keyboard for Christmas and set it up for me on that slidy shelf. After that I couldn’t find the credit card wallet and went on a deep dive to retrieve it from behind the printer under the computer desk. When it wasn’t there and I needed the credit card number to place an order I knew I had to at least declutter the stuff under the desk. That was my first reason for planning the decluttering task, with apologies to Jane.
My second incentive for actually plunging headlong into decluttering my office was this: the last time I did a major decluttering I found dozens of health insurance postal mailings that I’d never opened. We all get those and they are always the same and somehow they just pile up in a stack and I never open them. The last time I decluttered, my husband joined me on the office floor and we opened and tossed away 99.9% of them as the junk and statements (THIS IS NOT A BILL) I expected them to be. BUT … and this is important … my husband opened one that contained a $600 reimbursement check from the insurance company to me for overpayment on prescription drugs. WOW! If THAT doesn’t get you in a decluttering mood I don’t know what will. Anyway, the check was so stale and moldy you could almost smell it and I began moaning about the loss of $600 that I could have used at the time … or any time.
Several calls to the insurance company later, they cut me a new check and all was right with the world of stale checks and prescription drug over charges. I vowed NEVER to ignore another insurance company letter again … but things happen and I had a second unopened pile. The possibility of yet another unexpected windfall incentivized me to open those unopened mailings while I was on the scavenger hunt for the credit card wallet. One thing leads to another.
Then along comes Jane’s post … a February Decluttering Challenge … and I began the task. Her post WAS the thing that actually MOVED me into that office maze of dust, crumbs and the crumbling carcass of a small lizard our inside cat had caught two summers ago when it accidentally wandered inside the house through a crack under the living room storm door. When the cat stopped looking for it we assumed it had died somewhere. Finding it trapped in the office mire was another PLUS associated with this recent decluttering. The missing lizard mystery was finally solved.
So many good things can come from one gargantuan task that needed tackling a while ago.
For two weeks I put off almost everything while I rambled through the treasures in my office that were most recently trash. I bagged and shredded and sneezed my way through the clutter and ended up with enough “starter paper” for our family room wood stove to sustain us through the next several really harsh winters (or another toilet paper shortage). Sucked into our vacuum was enough dust to have made a planet-sized dust ball or perhaps the dust of several lost souls transitioning into the afterlife, although we don’t remember misplacing any house guests.
We finally understood the final days in the life of one unfortunate lizard at the paws of our cat and laid his crumbling carcass to rest in the “outside” from whence he had accidentally come on a sunny summer day two years ago.
Unfortunately, although my husband spent an entire day helping me, neither of us found a stale dated check that might have paid for a luxury cruise or a hot foreign automobile that would have made our neighbors envious for years to come. You can’t have everything.
But thanks to the well written blog challenge from Jane, I girded up my loins, met her February Decluttering Challenge and found my leather credit card wallet. It was nestled in the center of a thousand shredded papers in my paper shredder under my desk where it must have fallen off that slidy shelf where my keyboard sets. I can’t imagine how it got inside the shredder since the top was securely on. Go figure…
While most everybody else has spent a dull, snow-bound February, house-bound and miserable, with many thanks to a fellow blogger that made DECLUTTERING sound like an adventure, I have just come back from an office safari where I waded through years of accumulated dust, found a number of forgotten and misplaced treasures, re-homed several, filed lost documents into folders, relocated some stuff I should have tossed, found my credit card holder AND reverently gave last rites to a missing lizard, ending the mystery of a two-year-old cold case.
Thank you, Jane … it was a rewarding and productive challenge.
heimdalco 