The Great Purge and Clean of 2009

Let me be frank: December was a shitty month.

Oh, it ended beautifully, with a relaxing Christmas at Mom and Dad's house. Once I arrived back at their place, it was like the stress started melting off of me. All of the crap I dealt with in December (some of which I can't blog about) just took a back burner, and believe me, it was exactly what I needed.

I found myself wallowing in December. There were good things, like a couple of dates with Date Boy (fizzled out--a good thing, really, because we weren't very compatible), and a ton of awesome Chorale concerts. But good things can be overwhelming. Staying up 'til 5:00 in the morning watching movies with a new person, or standing for an hour singing Handel's Messiah is exhausting, even if it's fun.

When I wallow, things go by the wayside. The dust in my apartment is getting nasty. I need to pull furniture away from the walls and vacuum every nook and cranny. The bathroom isn't too horrid but it needs a good scrub-down. I need to wash my bed linens and my chorale dress (fortunately it's machine washable--I just hang it up to dry).

And I need to purge.

Purging is cathartic to me--a hoarder I am not. I've moved enough in my life to know that most things are replaceable or not important enough to bother replacing. I have a few things--my scrapbooks, certain parts of my Snoopy collection, my clarinet--that are very important, but other stuff is, well, just stuff.

So today, I've been going through my apartment doing the Great Purge of 2009. I have boxed up my well-used, beat-up old pots and pans, as Mom and Dad gave me a lovely set of Farberware for Christmas. I culled 2 garbage bags of Fat Girl clothes out of my closet. By the time spring rolls around, those blouses are going to be tents! I got rid of some cheap plastic cups because I now have a grown-up set of glasses. I've gone through my bookcases and pulled out some books I'll never read again to take to the used book store. My Goodwill pile is growing bigger and bigger. Tomorrow I'll load it all in the car and drop it off.

Even better, I've gone through my kitchen and purged the bad foods and a couple bottles of alcohol left over from all the drinking Date Boy seemed to want to do--he left Irish Whisky AND rum here. The rum--gone. The whisky...well, I'll keep it around, just in case. New Trainer has a good rule of thumb--for every serving of alcohol I drink, I must do one extra mile on the treadmill/stairs/elliptical. My drinking will be limited to special occasions, for sure.

Cleaning, organizing and purging make me feel in control. I can't control what happens to my job in 2010. I'm starting to brace myself for the fact that I could find myself moving again--I just don't know yet. I don't really want to, but I'll do what I have to do. I can't control what the outside world throws at me. But I can control my little corner of the planet, and so I'm ending 2009 with a lot of cleaning, purging, loading, hauling, and organizing. I figure it's best to start 2010 on a positive note, and I'll certainly enjoy lounging around on New Year's Day with black-eyed peas in the slow cooker and a good movie in the DVD player.