VACATION!! Let the 'GAMES' begin!!

I started my vacation today. I have several things "planned" for the next 9 days and some of that time involves clearing out some of our old "CARP". Bill is struggling a bit as he's just sure I'm going to throw away or "recycle" something he's attached to. I've been "planning" this cleaning for several weeks now. I'll look at rooms and visually decide, "that's GOT to GO!!". So I'm pretty well set in "my mind" what I'll be doing. It will involve at least ONE full load to the "dump" and as much as I can to Goodwill (even they have their standards). G

Today I had a busy morning and ran the dogs to the Chiro in Davenport through the rain to/from and stopped at a couple places on the way home to get some "supplies" for other projects to take place next week. I got home about 1230 and did a few putzie things.
(AKA - took a brief nap). (':

So I thought I'd start small and attack a couple of the cabinets in the bathroom! OMG!!! I can now open my own drug store. I have 8 new deodorants, 4 for me, 4 for Bill! (How did they keep getting added to the shopping list???) 4 tubes of toothpaste, 4 - 48 count boxes of sudafed (probably breaking a law there). I combined 6 different styles and brands of tampons into one box. Tossed several bottles of near empty hair gel away (I'm sure it was Bill's). Tossed 2 bottles of ibuprofen in the trash. They each had ONE pill in them!! I took the pill first of course. G UGH!! Through out countless, perfectly good, never been opened contacts. A few expired as far back as 2002.

I filled a tall kitchen garbage sack with the "junk" I took out of those two cabinets. A lot of it was those cardboard containers that just take up so much room when there's only one thing in them. The oldest expired thing I found was from 8/99 (not bad since we moved in 11/99). My peroxide expired in 04/04, but it still bubbles, so it's good. G Oh and up in the food area a box of raisin bran that expired in 8/07 (that will go to the chickens).

Then there's the towels. I made a "rag" pile. Of course I realized this pile will soon be migrated back into the "good" towels as Bill has a hard time understanding that "if" it has a big hole in it, move on to a better towel. I know that several of the towels we still use (which now have been moved to the rag pile) are from 1982 and my first year in the dorms at college. They even came from Target!!! Scary the things you can remember! We still use some of our wedding towels (1986) and we've added some. Our hard water is hard on towels, so we should probably recycle more often.

So the purging frenzy will continue next week. I'm getting rid of stuff we haven't worn in - 5 years! That's probably a LOW figure. A couple weeks ago when I was sorting socks and underwear I asked Bill to please start tossing his nasty socks and underwear in the trash after he's worn them. (Hey, it's clean, you might as well get one good use out of it) I know this has not been happening. So I asked him again. It's when I asked the second time that he wanted to know the criteria!! Honestly, do we need to draw a picture here!! LOL So I explained that if it had holes in it or the elastic was SHOT and his underwear wasn't staying up that was probably a pretty good indicator. It's apparent I'm going to have to start sorting before things go "into" the washer.

Happy Cleaning!!!