De-Cluttering and Other Winter Projects

We're back from visiting friends up north over New Year's; it's become a tradition for us to head up to their place a few days after Christmas and stay until about the 2nd or 3rd of January.  We always have a good time.  We got home on Thursday, but both of us ended up with the flu.  We're better, except that now I have a bit of a cold.

Now that the holidays are over and the Christmas decorations are put away, it's time for the "beginning of the new year" de-cluttering.  Actually, I got started a little early; when I got out the Christmas decorations, I weeded out what I didn't want anymore and offered those things to my daughter and daughter-in-law.  They took a few things, but most of the items have already gone to the thrift shop.  Now I can begin working on the rest of the house.  There are so many things we have that were originally nice to have, but now have really become sort of fixtures that we don't even notice anymore.  If that's the case, why keep them? 

I have de-cluttered many times before but always seem to end up getting more things.  This year I'm going to try not to do that.  We'll see how it goes, since in some ways I'm a packrat, but another side of me is the one that hates clutter.  How can I reconcile those two somewhat divergent sides of my personality, especially when I haven't been able to do it before? 

There are a couple of other projects I'd like to get done during the next several weeks before we can do much outdoors again.  I've been working on genealogy on my side of the family for a couple of years since both my parents died, and I'd like to get more of that done.  Fortunately, my dad had already done quite a bit of research on both his and my mother's families.  Secondly, I need to get end-of-life things written down for us.  We expect to live a long time yet, but it was so nice that my parents had written down everything they wanted for funeral arrangements,etc. and I want to do the same thing so that our kids will already have some things settled when we die.  And the third project is research into our farm.  We know the oldest part of the house is 150 years old, and we know who several of the owners were over the years, but there's still more research to do on it.  So I'll be spending some time at the county courthouse to find out more.

It looks like the next two or three months will be packed full!  I won't forget about this blog though; will try to post regularly.