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Day two of cleaning. Relics discovered while cleaning out the basement:

Burned CDs containing Weiss Kreuz episodes in Real Media format. Oh boy.

...I'm very glad that I have this on actual DVDs now. ;p

Also discovered:
- A whole bunch of art supplies
- An entire bin of good yarn that I completely forgot about
- All of my kitchen & household stuff from Saskatoon
- My dress-up clothes (and most of it still fits!!)
- A very good incense burner
- Photographs of people that I knew in undergrad and unfortunately no longer remember the names of
- Postcards from hokuton_punch as well as a few cute arts :)
- Sketchbooks filled with art that I can't stand to look at any more. Into the bin it goes! Except for two drawings that I still like, those can stay.

We had to stop early today because we ran out of bins and had to go buy more; some things are packed in cardboard boxes, and that's really not ideal, so we'll hopefully transfer those into the bins later. Four more days to go....

Things discovered while cleaning my closet:

-$5 in change
-A rubber bat
-My Little Pony magnets
-A long ponytail of my own hair
-4 pairs of shoes that fit
-4 pairs of dress shoes that fit but I wouldn't want to wear for long
-1 pair of Converse sneakers that do not fit
-A collected volume of Storm Constantine's Wraeththu trilogy
-One deck of Fushigi Yuugi playing cards
-5 duotangs full of my fanfiction
-2 GLAY CDs
-Miscellaneous unlabelled burned CDs that I'm going to have to check out later
-The warranty for a computer I bought in 2008
-A roadmap of Scotland (bonus: I have never been to Scotland and do not intend to go in the future)
-A very large Norwegian flag
-Two boxes of Prismacolour pencils

...And much, much more.

Keep in mind that I "cleaned this up" earlier this year. /cough

Oh boy. Some of this is going in the bin, some of this is getting recycled (I keep the handwritten drafts of my recent fics, but I really don't need the ones from 2009, do I?) and some is going to the secondhand. ...But I'm probably going to keep more things than I really need for the time being. I don't need eight pairs of shoes, but I have a thing I need to go to in August, want to keep my options open, pfff.

...I am definitely going to re-read Wraeththu. I don't know if I would like it now, and I'm really curious! When I was a teenager, it hit my id so fucking hard, man.

Also: I've mentioned before, but I'll mention again, Marie Kondo's suggestion of storing one or two bags/purses inside the other is great. It helps them keep their shape, and it frees up a bit more space. I have a few messenger bags in there, and man, it really helps to store them nested like that.

Earlier in the year, the local library set up a few Little Free Libraries around town. I've made it a habit to go to the one nearest to me on weekends and tidy it up. It's in an old newspaper dispenser set up in a park.

There's usually nothing of interest to me, which is fine because I don't want to add to my collection anyway. I've been bringing a book with me every time I go, and they tend to be snatched up pretty quickly. (Today's was Atwood's The Robber Bride, which I liked a lot but probably won't want to re-read.) I'm really glad that we have it, because we don't really have anywhere in this city that deals in secondhand books, and this makes it easier for me to offload stray books without guilt, heh.

But man, every time I go down there, it's so untidy! I don't know why people can't arrange things neatly when they leave books in there. It only takes a minute to stand things vertically so that you can see the titles. Come on, guys, we can't have nice things if we don't take care of them....

Ah, well. Weeding of my collection is going slo-o-owly but surely, and this helps. And it's a nice walk to get down there - about 30 minutes. I guess if other people can't keep it neat, I might as well do it myself. ;)

My room is shaped in such a way that it's very difficult to use the drawers in my desk. Things are so tight in here that everything's pressed really close. The drawers would kind of open partly - only halfway; they'd get blocked by my bookcase and wouldn't open further. So I tended to only use them as a place to shove stuff that I didn't need immediately, couldn't display anywhere, or didn't want to look at any more.

Yesterday, I discovered that if I move my desk one inch to the right, and my bookcase one inch to the left... it gives just enough clearance to open everything properly.

This has been my bedroom for 20 years, excluding the time spent at university. It's a little ridiculous that I only noticed this now! But never mind.

Things I found in my drawers:

-Art by hokuton_punch :D!
-Handwritten self-insert Digimon fanfiction from when I was 13
-Handwritten self-insert Legend of Zelda/Pokemon crossover fanfiction from when I was 12
-A journal from when I was 11
-Printed-out letters/logs related to an Animorphs roleplay from when I was 11
-LOTS of my old drawings from around 2000-2004
-Printed-out chat logs with an old friend that I have lost contact with
-All of the essays from my 3rd and 4th years of undergrad, including a letter from a professor I respected very much, now unfortunately deceased
-Several books, including a beautifully illustrated copy of The Rubayat of Omar Khayyam and my mother's 1-volume copy of The Lord of the Rings from 1979
-A deck of Weiss Kreuz playing cards
-Five boxes of Fazer salmiakki
-Tons of Prismacolour pencil crayons
-Letters from my ex
-Copious amounts of my ex's art, including a calendar of our OC pairings that he made for me one Christmas (regardless of how I feel about him now, that's still one of the sweetest and best gifts I've ever received)

A lot of these fall under what Marie Kondo would call "sentimental items", and I'm not ready to tackle them now. So, I've put most of it back, except... tidier and stacked vertically when space allows.

It's already a huge improvement - I can see everything, all of my stationery is in one place, and so on. I'm pretty pleased with it, even though I'm not finished here.

I found out that my parents are going to be going to Athabasca this upcoming weekend. Which means I'll have the house to myself. Hooray!

I'm kind of getting overwhelmed by all of the stuff that I want to do. Not even wild and crazy stuff, just like, the kind of chores that I'm not comfortable doing when there are people around to nitpick the way I do it. Like cleaning the dishwasher. Or rinsing the last bit of winter muck off my car.

And... hopefully I'll be able to find some time to practice my harmonica. I haven't played that thing in ages, because it's not exactly the kind of thing one wants to do when there are other people around.

(Oh snap, I have some writing projects that I need to get done, too. WELL... we'll see about that business. :V )

Currently reading: Debussy: A Painter in Sound by Stephen Walsh. I'm about 2/3 of the way through this one, and so far, my feelings are... Well. Monsieur Debussy composed some very pretty piano music, but he seems to have been the sort of man who cheated on women and flaked out when it came to delivering on projects. He doesn't seem like the sort of person I'd get along with, heh. That said... his flakiness is somewhat interesting - the way he kept getting distracted by theatre projects that never came to fruition, which had a negative effect on his finances, and the way he was (apparently) obsessed with the idea of writing an opera based on The Fall of the House of Usher - there's something about all this, or the way Walsh describes all this, that makes him seem very ordinary and familiar. I think a lot of us have known people kind of like this.

Also currently reading: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo. I'm about 1/4 through this one. Like I expected, there is some advice here that is very applicable to me, and other things that are not so much. From a quick flip-through, I think there are some things later in the book that I will find very useful (and there's one that I've already started to try, in fact: emptying my bag when I come home every day). Like any self-help book, it's very "your mileage may vary", I think. I plan to make note of the things I find useful, and post about them later, after I've finished with it. One thing that does surprise me is that, the "discarding" part of her process should be done quickly - but she specifies that by "quickly" she means six months. That's a hell of a lot longer than I would have expected. I'm from a house where, every year, we had to declutter, deep-clean, and make the entire house immaculate, within the span of one month. Every single summer. I hated it! But, that's outside the scope of this journal entry, so. ;)

Reading next: I have a few books out from the library, will get to them once I'm finished the above. Titles are:
The Frangipani Tree Mystery - Ovidia Yu; mystery novel set in 1936 Singapore
Mouthful of Birds - Samanta Schweblin; short stories
Queen of Attolia - Megan Whalen Turner; this one is on order at the library, not in my hands yet.