FlyLady progress...

So I've been slowly working on my FlyLady project for about a month now, and I am slowly starting to see improvement in my house hold.  I still struggle with some of the basic stuff like keeping my kitchen sink shining, and picking out my outfits at night so I don't have to do it in the morning, but all in all, I think I'm actually doing quite well.  As I mentioned before, I de-cluttered quite a bit in my kitchen and it was looking fabulous, but then I got busy and I haven't kept up on it as I should and now clutter is starting to show its ugly face again.  I suppose that it could be a clever strategy on my part:  Get rid of the obvious clutter, open up some nice flat surfaces for clutter to start sneaking out onto, and just when it is starting to get comfortable you nab it all up and get rid of it!!!!!  Bwahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaa!  Really, the fact that my kitchen is no longer quite so organized is just a clever ploy on my part to trap unsuspecting clutter and rid my life of it.  See, that makes me feel better... 

I have been doing much better though.  In the past 2-3 weeks I have completely filled not only our garbage can, but also several of my in-law's garbage cans as well (we live next door to them so I get to do annoying things like that!) with just sheer rubbish.  I am a bit surprised at how much trash I have been bringing out.  Granted we are remodeling our house so that is so be expected, but I wasn't expecting quite this much.  Take our mud room for example: Every time I clean it out and get it looking all nice and pretty it only seems to take about 3 days and then it is filled with trash again!  Now a lot of this is due to our dog Barley dragging stuff in, but a lot of it is not.  I am surprised every time that I bring several trash bags full of garbage out to the street.  I thought that I just did this...  I could have sworn....  Oh well.  The good thing about all of this is that it is going, and I don't have to deal with it anymore. 

Yesterday I de-cluttered something that I have been avoiding for quite some time out of a sense of moral obligation.  Books.  Allow me to explain.  I have a theory about my family genetic code.  There is something in our genes that compels us to gather and collect massive amounts of books.  My mother literally has hundreds, possibly more than a thousand.  Her cousin (my aunt Kari)  once told me that ALL of her daughters (she has 4 or 5...) collect unholy amounts of books, and that she does that herself.  Why do we have all of these books?  Well, you remember those dooms-day stories about how the world has returned to the dark ages because all books have either been burned, destroyed, or used as toilet paper, and how a few brave souls who kept them hidden safely saved the world from destruction and despotism?  Well if those stories were real then the women in my family would be those brave souls saving the world one hoarded book at a time.  We love them.  Just having them around makes life worth living.  We don't even have to read them all the time, just having them and knowing that they are there when we want them is enough.  Well I have my own decent book collection, no where near as good as my mom's or my cousin's, but a good start.  The problem is that some of those books that I have aren't worth keeping for me.  I do want to have a good variety of books for my children to read (I plan on homeshooling them, but that is a completely different topic!) but I don't think that "In Search of Wallace Whipple" is going to be on my "must read" list.  So why do I have it?  And there were plenty on my shelves like that.  Books that I had been given as gifts or I picked up from thrift stores that I would never read.  So why do I have them?  So yesterday I went through some of my books and made a big stack of ones that I am going to give away.  I don't need them or want them, so I'm getting rid of them. And while part of me has a sense of guilt in throwing away the printed word in any form, part of me feels good too, because I know they will go to someone who really wants them.  Besides, I don't really care if those books get burned... :-)