At Home

We arrived here on Monday night. We are really glad to see our own house, but it's so full of STUFF! Saturday, we took a little pile of worn out clothes to GoodWill in San Diego, which got me thinking, and here at home, I started a decluttering project:

• Tuesday: To the Salvation Army. A carload of old clothing, a little from each closet and from full chests of drawers went into the big boxes in the SA parking lot.
• Wednesday: To the city reuse drop-off facility. We gave up half of our lifetime collection of Scientific American magazines and a large bag of packing peanuts. I asked myself: when did we last look into one of the roughly 600 SciAms? Answer: Evelyn used to use them for high school research projects.
  
• Thursday: To the city dump with the remaining SciAms, several electronic corpses, and another large bag of packing peanuts. (See accompanying photos.) It turns out that the reuse facility isn't really that happy to get any magazines.
  
• Friday: To the library book sale drop-off. The car now contains 4 boxes of books that we probably will never read again, and I'm going there any minute. Choosing the books for this graveyard is the most challenging task. I included quite a few selections from my book club that I don't want to reread. Also, all the Modern Library volumes of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past in the Scott-Moncrieff translation -- when I read it again (maybe that should be if, but I retain illusions) I want one of the newer translations.
  

Is the house really free of clutter? No, it's still crowded with STUFF. But there's a little wiggle room.