I Conquered the Haystack

I try to stay organized so that when I am looking for something I can easily find it. In an attempt to find a particular picture frame that I had stored away before we moved last year, I kept stealing a few minutes here and there to sneak up into the attic and look for it. This went on all morning and it was well into the afternoon before I finally found it.

During my searches I found some fun and interesting stuff that I had forgotten about completely. I found my super-compact spy binoculars from when I was a kid. (Yes, I wanted to be a spy. Being a super-resourceful smart person has always appealed to me.) I also found a cool tool for blowing really huge bubbles. I’m not sure how it works and I’m afraid that my toddler will inhale a large amount of soap instead of blowing the bubbles out of the proper end of the tube. He’d probably be belching bubbles for a week. Maybe I should put that item back where I found it for now.

Most of the boxes and totes are labeled, because if everything was just packed into nondescript boxes and then the boxes stacked haphazardly here and there it would be impossible to locate anything. I went through some of the totes three or four times; I looked through boxes that couldn’t possibly contain picture frames. I tried to determine how long it had been since I’d seen the frame- was it possible that I had gotten rid of it?

I finally found it. In the tote marked “photos”, of all places. Imagine that. In a shoe box where I usually keep packets of loose pictures. Oh well. I was just glad that I didn’t have to run up and down the attic stairs anymore, or sift through boxes while the merciless sun beat upon the roof of the house, cooking me alive.

During my hunt I happily realized that I have a lot more stuff up there to get rid of then I thought, so that means we’ll have a lot more room in which to put all of the stuff that we will acquire over the next couple of years. Acquire/store, use/don’t use, recycle/throw away. It’s a vicious cycle.