The photos above are from my 3rd bedroom, as it was in mid December 2012.
I have made good progress in clearing out the 3rd bedroom since those photos were taken. And I have even started clearing out the 2nd and 4th bedrooms as well, the 2nd now becoming somewhat passable for the first time in months.
No, I did not meet my goal of having the 3rd bedroom (the one eventually intended for a friend) entirely cleared out by January 1, but I have many good excuses for missing that goal. I was ill for the 3rd week of December, and not fully recovered by the start of the 4 day Christmas weekend. Then very cold and sometimes drizzly and windy weather set in. We don't consistently get wintery weather during December in Central Texas, but it's been pretty consistently wintery for the past 3 weeks. Having just gotten over a bad respiratory illness, I'm was not going to be carrying junk out across the back yard when the temperature is 40 and it's blowing at 15-20 mph or drizzly. I did make progress during the early afternoon of December 28, when I hauled out all the big plastic containers filled with papers, books, and magazines that had been sorted to reduce volume by 70%. That was the only nice warm afternoon in the past few weeks, just over 70 degrees, and I sacrificed my usual after breakfast nap to do the moving. Moving actually goes quite quickly when you have stuff boxed up and ready to move, and I felt that was the time to do it.
So as not to consider this lack of meeting my goal slipping back, I've made a new goal, that of having the 3rd bedroom entirely cleared out, as I had been intending to do by Jan 1, AND having the 2nd and 4th bedrooms completely passible (i.e. no papers or junk on floor, so you can walk around freely) by February 1. At least that's a forward moving goal, and one that also requires a lot more work inside my house where I'm likely to be mostly anyway, though it's also quite possible that foul weather, which often continues into mid February, will get in the way of that goal too, so I may have to triple down then with an even more ambitious goal, say that of having Lyndhurst nicely resorted and inventoried too, by March 1.
It also is a golden opportunity because now that the floor of the 3rd bedroom was cleared, that room has lots of space for sorting the boxes and piles of stuff from the other bedrooms. Those other bedrooms have gotten so packed with stuff, no sorting can be done in them, the most you can do is pull stuff out of them and sort it elsewhere. And since I can't carry stuff outside anyway, it's good to have all the stuff organized into containers for efficient moving when the weather improves.
Possibly the biggest bit of progress was made over the Christmas holiday weekend, starting on Monday December 24. On that day, my nose finally stopped running so I could sort stuff without constantly having to blow my nose and re-wash my hands. So I really got into the sorting thing. When I started the floor of the 3rd bedroom was piled up to 18 inches high all over with papers, magazines, unopened mail, books, plastic bags, and so on. During the previous few years, whenever I was cleaning up for one of my monthly parties, and there was stuff of this kind, I simply carried it to the 3rd bedroom. OK, well, maybe it wasn't quite that simple, sometimes I carried it first to the master bedroom thinking I'd sort it out after the party.
After sorting all day December 24 I was really swinging the paper axe, so I continued right through most of December 25 and cleared a similar pile in the corner of the master bedroom, and a much smaller (but nasty) pile right next to the night stand. (It was nasty because it was papers all built up around a remote control having corroded batteries. I needed to carefully remove and detoxify the remote, put it into a plastic bag, and stash for later repair.)
About 2/3 of the stuff went to the recycling can. Certain things had to be boxed, certain magazines I am saving, certain kinds of receipts and other paperwork, certain interesting looking articles, and some rarely needed manuals. Those boxed items were put into 2 new 14 gallon plastic containers which were taken out to Lyndhurst on December 28. Credit card statements and credit offer were mostly stripped out of their envelopes and advertising inserts and put in special "to be shredded" can. Some of such were just dumped into that can without being stripped from their envelopes too, when I got impatient or was running out of time. I opened so many envelopes my finger was hurting so I started using a knife to open envelopes--the first time I've ever done that.
So by the end of December 25 not only had I cleared the floor of the 3rd bedroom of all the papers, I had started examining the 6 large plastic containers (up to 28 gallon) in the corner of the room. Most of them contained more papers of a similar kind as was on the floor, and I managed to clean out a sizeable fraction of their now obviously unneeded contents. But I didn't finish that process, or continue it much during the next two work days, and then on December 28 I simply hauled all the plastic containers out to Lyndhurst and found some way of stashing them there.
I also hauled a fair number of old audio components out to Lyndhurst, and stacked on the high shelf on the north side mostly. A typical component in that pile is the Sony DVD-7000 player. That was the first DVD player from Sony, a Reference component for many years. But since it won't play DVD-R discs, and it won't play SACD's or DVD-Audio's, it's no longer useful to me. I think it could be sold for enough on eBay to make it worth selling, but not much more.
When it got warm for an hour or so on Sunday December 30th I carried a few more components out to Lyndhurst, including a Nikko Alpha III amplifier that was the darling of Audio Directions when I worked there in 1979. Since then I've decided it really doesn't sound as good as my newer amplifiers, even the Parasound HCA-1000A. But I don't really want to trash it either. It's almost worth holding onto for sentimental reasons, though I'd be glad to sell it at a price high enough to cover the considerable effort required to pack and ship.
Now actually the floor of the 3rd bedroom is largely covered with open containers from the 2nd and 4th bedrooms that are getting resorted. But that's progress toward the new goal.
In the process of doing this kind of sorting I always find interesting things. One was an article from Jamie Galbraith writing in 2003 describing the evidence that JFK had positively decided to pull out of Vietnam by 1965 and positively not send actual "troops" (at that time, only "advisors" had been sent) to fight a major war to defend South Vietnam. Then he was shot a month later. The timing and many other known facts and speculations support the idea that the decision to pull out of Vietnam and Kennedy's being shot were not coincidental. Jamie was making that point and has some first hand association with this as well as having spent a long time thinking about it. His father, John K Galbraith, was an advisor to Kennedy.
Still, I have to say, the actual evidence presented was not exactly iron clad. If you read the transcription of a Kennedy dialog Jamie included in the article (Kennedy actually recorded discussions in the White House, though not as obsessively as Nixon) it's a little vague, actually. You have to know the context of the Cold War--the intense hawkish anti-Communist attitude in the US generally--to understand it.
It's partly that Kennedy is NOT being so hawkish that makes the story. He's not sounding like a peacenik either, however. Noam Chomsky, notably and noted in the article, disagreed with Jamie's hypothesis, though I'm not sure Chomsky had read that particular dialog presented by Jamie, which was enough, but just barely enough, to confirm my new suspicions. I was perfectly willing to accept the conclusions of the Warren Commission until sometime in the 2000's, and I had always thought of Kennedy as hawkier than hawk for his "missile gap" campaign ploy. But now I have seen recordings of press conferences in which the press was basically ganging up on Kennedy for not being sufficiently warmongering. In addition to possibly deciding to pull advisors out of Vietnam, Kennedy also resisted sending the Air Force to defend the CIA's invasion of Cuba, resisted escalating the Cuban Missile crisis, and did not cause a military confrontation over the construction of the Berlin wall, three things that made cold war hawks very angry at the time, but also quite possibly the reason we're still around today. Kennedy said at one point that the President's number one job is to keep the USA out of war. And he may have done that far better than his successors. If he had succeeded in keeping the USA from fighting a full on war in Vietnam, things today might be far different.
If I had never sorted through these papers, I would have never found this very interesting article.
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