the great purge

The past couple of weeks have been full of ups and downs. Thanksgiving was really good, and then I got home and started cleaning, purging, donating, selling and/or throwing away all sorts of material possessions. As you might have gathered from some of my recent posts, these were all positive things. Occasionally I'll feel like I can't get rid of something, but that's less than 10% of the items that I come across in the house. More on that in a minute.

The negatives have been major lows as well. I crashed my car into a curb during our most recent snowstorm, so I've been without my beloved car for a week now. I hate the rental car that I have; it's too big and kind of sloppy. Sure, it gets me from a to b, but I won't be sad to see it go. Particularly annoying with this beast of an automobile is its size. We live in a townhome and don't have a big garage, and this thing barely fits in the garage. I should have been more careful, because I thought I had it in all the way when I actually didn't, and I ended up scraping the beast's rear bumper in the process. Great--more money I'm going to have to waste on car repairs.

Back to my activities around the house. Over the past week and a half, eBay has become my best friend and I've listed and/or sold about 150 items, most of which have been CDs and DVDs. It's been painful to organize, catalog and document things and then get them listed on eBay, but I think the effort has been worth it. I've already grossed more than $2000, and I've still got thousands of items left to go through. That's right--THOUSANDS. I'm trying to get rid of the most valuable stuff first, but eventually I'll probably just get to a place where I go through the many shelves of recorded media I have in order, purging my way through. Based on what I've been seeing and feeling thus far, I think it's a reasonable goal to get down to less than 100 CDs and less than 100 DVDs by the end of 2012. It will be painful, but worth it--both from a financial perspective and from a sanity perspective.

Lots of other things have gone up for sale or will be going soon as well:

- Guitar pedal
- Headphones
- Kindle (this was a tough decision, but I'm glad it went to a good home)
- Clothes
- Shoes
- Books
- Camcorder

My home office has never been so clean or empty, and it feels good. I've also noticed that without all the clutter in the room, my music sounds a lot better. I've got Isaac Hayes (the soundtrack from "Shaft") cranked up right now, and it sounds AMAZING. It's not like it's the first time I've ever listened to this album, either. It's shocking how much of a difference having a clean room is making.

More to come on the great purge...