our dirty BIG secret

I have a couple secrets to share with you. It's all probably TMI and I will probably alienate a lot of you out there....but there could be someone out there in blogland who will find comfort that they are not alone....

We'll start with my problem with procrastination. Dodi, on January 23rd mentions in her blog that she finally put away Christmas. I read it, I laughed, I commented....but shamefully I had my stack of various nativities on the side table waiting for me to pack up.

Well come March they were still there. Last week, I FINALLY packed them up. If you look closely you can see the clovers on the newspaper ads....that would be ads for St. Patrick's day. How sad is that? Wrapping Christmas up with St. Patrick's day advertisements......

All wrapped and ready to go into...what is our next dirty secret.....our basement. Have you ever seen the show Hoarders? I love that show. I'm horrified by that show. I AM that show. At least my basement is. Let's start with over 20 years ago when my dad died. I packed away some of his books. We both shared a love of reading and a love of collecting books. The problem was, I never opened those boxes again. Part of it was that it was too painful, partly who knows why. We've been carting these books with us over seven moves (Jason, in this case is a freakin' saint!). We moved into this house about six years ago and have have since remodeled the first two floors. The problem is that I've just been throwing stuff in the basement to-deal-with-later as each room got completed that combined with the boxes and boxes of books have given us THIS:

My project for the next couple of months is to go through EVERYTHING and throw out at least....gasp - half, okay maybe a third, mostly a fourth of the junk down there and find a home for whatever we keep. I started today, I cleaned out six boxes and have three boxes in a pile to donate to Good Will and the library.

And, I found these gems....
Jason threatened to slap me when I began to disparage his trekkiness.

We also found some of my high school report cards...which Jason decided to scan and save on his computer --why? I wanted to toss them....seriously a D in Algebra, like I want my kids to see that? I definitely don't want them to see the 30 absences from the same class (a correlation?)

We also found my high school literary publication where I had a poem published....Jason read it and laughed and laughed...His comment was, 'geeze, trace, was part two how you slit your wrists, can you get more depressing? Maybe we should send this to the Zoloft company and they can use it in an ad" I won't include the poem here...thankfully I've grown out of that teen-girl-life-is-horrible-angst.

This project may be funner then I thought it would be. Tomorrow, more boxes. I wonder what I'll find.