Good Clean Fun

Well....maybe not so much the fun part.

I'm still on my mission from God to clean my house. Next on my list was the computer room downstairs. I'd been putting it off cuz...dang.

Over the weekend, Don put away some of his stuff so I could actually have room to get to the closet. Yes, it's that bad. I steeled myself yesterday and went down there. It still makes me shiver in a bad way. I looked around and wondered where would be a good place to start. What would give me courage and inspire me to soldier on?

That would be my desk. I am...how you say in French...organizationally challenged. Or, as they say in Romanish, I'm a huge freekin' slob. I like to sugar coat it a bit and say I just don't think in a linear fashion. Either way, my desktop hasn't seen the light of day in months.

I looked at the pile of bills (all paid, but their little stubs abandoned like the red-headed stepchild. Hey wait a minute! I am a red-headed stepchild. I feel sad all of a sudden) medical receipts, financial reports (we seem to be holding steady)and miscellaneous sales brochures and coupons that I save with good intentions but let their expiration dates go by like so many brass rings. The best place to start would be to file this pile.

I actually have a filing system in place. I have folders for every one of those items languishing on my desk. I had devised a system where I would keep the current year's records in my desk drawer and last year's records in the file next to my desk. This file would also hold records that need to be kept for more than one year.

What's the problem with that system? Um...yea...I don't use it. I just let that crap pile up on my desk. That's the problem. As Don would say, "User error."

I looked online to see what was the current wisdom for keeping stuff. I had been keeping everything for at least a year. For utility bills and credit card bills, the current consensus seems to be...once the payment has gone through, you can toss it. For actual receipts of certain items, you might want to hold onto for warranty purposes. I need to make a seperate file for those things. Those receipts got tossed in with every other receipt and consequently lost.

This was good news to me. This means I can leave a pile on my desk and as soon as the check clears, into the shredder! No more keeping the trash bills for a year. What was I thinking?

Financial statements I'll still keep for a year. Property taxes, yes. Income taxes, seven years cuz you know we're scandalous. I had been keeping medical bills, too, in case the insurance company wants to pick a fight. But unless it's a major bill, like Lila needs her appendix out again, I don't think I'll worry about it. I'm not going to waste my time fighting a $30 office visit co-pay.

So what did I actually accomplish yesterday on my Godly quest for cleanliness? That pile is still on my desk. But...I cleaned out the files in the drawers. I have 3 trash bags of shredded paper to prove it. There were a few files that I skipped over cuz I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with it. Like the MCI/Worldcom file. I might want to burn that one. And spit on it. And say curse words. But I digress. The pile on my desk will shrink significantly today. Once that is done, the rest of the stuff on my desk will be easy. Once my desk in done, the rest of the room will seem brighter and more hopeful.

Will it stay clean?

Ask me in six months.