etc.

There’s nothing quite like a three-day weekend to get me in the mood for a wholesale cleaning and all-round purge of things forgotten or no longer required or just plain in need of reorganization.

The picture project: all our photographs have been sitting in their lame developer’s envelopes in a wicker basket on the lowest shelf of a little bookcase. I would have been happy to leave them there if it wasn’t for two simple reasons: 1. the basket had reached maximum capacity and the overflow was making its way to my desk, which is entirely unacceptable because I cannot have a messy desk; and 2. since the said wicker basket was on the lowest shelf of said bookcase, the cats routinely used the basket as a scratching post/teething station, and have managed to eat through the delicately woven layers and were beginning to set upon the photograph envelopes themselves. Ergo, a new storage solution for the photographs was becoming imminently necessary.

I knew that the conventional photo album would not suffice since my photographs range in size from classic to panoramic and another size somewhere in between. My sister suggested photo boxes, which I initially dismissed, but later realized were my only option. So, photo boxes it is then. After a successful (and thrifty) trip to the mall, I returned with two photo boxes, attractively covered with handmade Japanese papers, and proceeded to spend about three hours organizing my photographs in chronological order. Funny how a domestic annoyance that has been ignored for months can be dealt with in a pleasant few hours, with the aid of two small boxes and some index cards.

The shoe project: this one does not have such a happy ending. The plan was to reorganize the hall closet and tame the unwieldly mountain of shoes that was growing at the closet’s base. Starting with nothing but zealous good intentions, as most home projects begin, I pulled all 36 pairs (I lied when I said 20, the number is actually 28. Hence the need for the purging and reorganization project) out of the closet and into the hallway, only to throw my hands up in dismay a few seconds later and hurl all 36 pairs back into the closet, into a pile that was a little more sad and disturbed than the one that spurred the reorganization zeal in the first place. It appears as though I cannot tame two household demons in one day.