Not Counting

I realized not long ago that I haven’t been taking “before” pictures. Oh well. I didn’t realize I might want to take photos of things like the inside the the closet. Suffice it to say before November we couldn’t get the hall closet or the bedroom closet to even close. Now we have room to spare and to organize eventually. I also haven’t been dutifully counting all the items leaving. Yesterday and today we did scented candles. I didn’t count how many I kept or got rid of. I can estimate we probably have 70+ left, and got rid of almost half of what we had. By the time my husband started boxing things up, he also taped them, so they couldn’t fall out if something shifted or slipped. We were too tired to count them. I’ve come to the conclusion that if you have that much time and energy to count things at that point, and you’re not already tired or semi-exhausted, you’re not doing it correctly. You’re not working hard enough to evaluate all that junk. The few iffy candles left we have agreed to light or melt in the next days/weeks so we can definitively decide if they need to stay or go (vs. keeping them indefinitely).

Now the sad thing is that even though we can’t think of any more hiding places for the candles, there are a couple that weren’t accounted for, that we really liked. We had two of one scent that smelled like fresh baked bread. The lesson here is that we had troves of candles, weren’t using or enjoying even half of them, and now we can’t even enjoy what we believe was the best one.

If you think this is bad, you should know that for a white elephant gift last Christmas we got rid of two large boxes of candle making supplies and a couple of candle-making books. Yeah. Still doesn’t seem much progress with how many left over. Aside from testing the iffy ones, I half wonder if I need to go back through them in another week or so and see if I can eliminate more. Except that it’s so tiring to do all this. One a good note, last night we had a big pile of iffy candles, and now I think we have less than 10, after another round of sniffing this morning. At least there’s a thrift/donation store less than a mile down the road so it doesn’t matter how many trips we need to make. At least it’s usually not a big ordeal. It’s more work getting things sorted, packed up, and down to the car than going there.