The recycle bin is full

M and I had a pretty productive Sunday- even though mine didn't start until around noon. He was good and went to church even though I wouldn't because of a tummy ache. When he got home, we sat around for a bit, reading magazines and talking about how cute our dog is. Then for some inexplicable reason, I started cleaning out the trunk/coffee table in the den. It generally stores old blankets and picture frames, but we needed to make room for some random office-type stuff that's been taking over all of the horizontal surfaces in the room. We started by declaring several old wool blankets bound for Goodwill. We used to need them all, but then I started collecting quilts from family members, leaving the itchier wool blankets unused. We also tossed some old pictures (prints I'd swiped from family basements for use in college apartments) and some frames into the Goodwill pile, and now we have 75% of the trunk space available for the box of file folders and M's gazillion CD's of random thesis data and geomorphology pics. Then I organized M's receipts from the entire last year (bring on the audit) and organized all the files I brought home upon my "retirement." Cleaning out these files left us with an obscene amount of paper to recycle. (How much money do insurance companies spend on printing the same stuff year after year?) M worked on cleaning more stuff out of the baby's room and shredding junk mail credit card offers. I finished off the afternoon by vacuuming and dusting the downstairs. So, our den/office is organized and the bottom half of our house is clean.

After dinner, I took to some old magazines that were laying around. Old magazines are one of my biggest pet peeves. Every time I get a new magazine, I am instantly compelled to throw away the previous issue. I also can't bear to hang on to catalogs once I've determined that I'm not purchasing anything (which is always just after the first time I browse said catalogs). My distaste for piles of glossy magazines makes me very happy to live in a city that recycles them. Anyway, just because I don't want to collect old magazines doesn't mean there isn't valuable information to be had from amongst their pages. I started notebooks of magazine articles in grad school. So, before I throw away an old magazine, I always look through it one more time looking for decorative ideas, gift ideas, or recipes that I may someday regret tossing out. I have one enormous binder in the kitchen that provides a home for the recipes. Another binder holds the gift ideas and other stuff. (There's a whole section of "organize your closets/cabinets/freezer/underwear drawer" types of articles.) I hadn't cleaned that binder out in quite awhile, so I worked on it for a bit while M enjoyed the season's first televised football game. I usually manage to purge the recipe binder every six months or so. I refuse to keep recipes that I've had for over a year if I've never made them and can't actually foresee making them in the very near future (in reality, I usually don't understand why I tore them out once I get to this point).

Can you tell I am bored right now? I just keep typing even though there is nothing insightful or interesting spewing forth from my keyboard.

Just the same, we finally gave Otis a much-needed bath tonight. He didn't smell before the bath, but he actually smells good now, and he is so soft and fluffy. He's asleep on a vent by my feet right now. Have I mentioned that I love my dog? Here's some pics...my fingers are tired of typing.