HAPPY NEW YEAR 2010

Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right.
-- Oprah Winfrey

Welcome 2010!
--Cat

Organized...

. . . I'm not.

My office resembles chaos, bookshelves overflowing, not only with books but with a menagerie of small stuffed creatures that seem to multiply of their own accord. This is almost as bad as my Beanie Babies (remember those?) collection, who now occupy a box under the bed.

I look wistfully at the bookshelves. The books are roughly organized: novels, biographies, history, geography, dictionaries, Writers Market 1998! (time to recycle that one) At one time I planned to alphabetize everything.

Somehow that plan never bore fruit. I have ruined the overall effect by slotting paperback novels into any available space, whether it's among poetry, world history, Shakespeare... Time to give some of these intruders away to a good home.

It's tough for me to part with books. We once had a garage sale and sold a number of books I believed I'd never read again. I often regret having sold them--not that I'd probably read them again--but they were like precious caskets filled with drama, love, hate, laughter, tears that writers graciously shared.

~

A need to compartmentalize does, however, rear its head every now and then. I focus this urge on my computer where I create folders within folders within folders for my favorites or bookmarks, depending on which browser I'm on. If I don't sort these into aptly named folders the list grows huge and I can't find anything.

While I'm there, I also weed out those that I never visit, that have closed, or that I wonder why on earth did I save this?

Organizing bookmarks is small potatoes next to my writing files folders within folders etc. Does a cache of thousands sound too plentiful?

And yes, I have a real life filing cabinet with, you guessed it, green and blue folders holding manila folders filled with actual papers.

Actual papers have not yet declined, despite the computer age. Seems every day we take a stack to the recycle bin or the shredder.

These are not all bills, either.

--Cat