Deaccessioning...

Maybe it's something to do with my longing for spring that's brought about this urge to clean house. Not scrubbing, mind you. Though I do that from time to time, I never have the longing to...

In my never ending process of de-cluttering and actually putting things away from the places where I've dropped them, I will suddenly come across an object I no longer want or need. Without hesitating (lest I have second thoughts) I try and put the items in one particular place - my outbox, to borrow a term from Apartment Therapy. They sit there until the next chance I have for a thrift store run. And almost always, once they are in the outbox, I really never think of them again.

This weekend, I had a chance to get several bags of stuff out of my house, including:

-clothes I was given but couldn't use
-clothes I never wore
-VCR tapes I replaced with DVDs
-some CDs I listened to and hated
-4-5 random mugs
-some fuzzy critters from my distant youth or not so distant past (it's tough, but slowly I am able to let go of ~5 per year)
-rubber stamps (gasp! But not that many - maybe 10 - I will hardly notice...)
-plastic bags taken to recycling in the grocery store (I know, how could I. But not to worry, I still have more than enough.)

And, of course, I had no sooner returned home when I found, in my kitchen cabinets, the next pile of things to get rid of. Thus the cycle starts again...

Twenty years of valentines...

I realized this year that I had been making valentines for some time now. My earliest efforts as an adult were cut-up sections of wrapping paper, always with a valentine-esque quote on the inside (I remember that my first quote was part of the very brief love scene at the end of Henry V, indicative of my complete crush on Kenneth Brannagh. Swoon!).



Once rubber stamping came into my life after my senior year in college, there was no going back. I realized this year that the interior quotes moved first to the outside of the cards, and then disappeared entirely.



Part of that was a time crunch - if it wasn't part of the process of making the card itself, it wasn't going in. It was too labour-intensive to do all of that writing!



But I missed the words, which are faithfully part of so many of my creations, even if you can't read them. This year's offering returns the quote to the interior:



"One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life; that word is love." -Sophocles

Happy Valentine's Day!