Dy-NO-mite!!!: 40 Bags in 40 Days: Day 1

Remember this? - this was my living area corner yesterday. I love books. (Obviously.) My kids and husband love movies and video games, obviously. But, we've read (most of) the books, seen most of the movies - and even if we were ever to want to watch/read them again - we have 5 Kindles between the 4 of us, an iPad, and netflix on each of the 3 televisions in our home. We do not heed this stuff. (See the original Nintendo Entertainment System circa 1987 in the bottom left corner there? We kept it, but we stored it properly...)

My day went like this:

1. I finished a trial calendar, so I blew off the office the rest of the day and finished a quilt for the St. Mary's School auction... (gratuitous quilt photos follow...)

Then, I took a break at lunchtime and got on Facebook and clicked a shared link to this:

40 Bags in 40 Days.

My mind started ticking away all the reasons I should... nay HAD to do this.

(My husband is rolling his eyes right now. I have some hairbrained ideas....)

Then I made a plan. I printed this out: WHBS Shared Free PDF Planner

So far it looks like this:

Then I ran a bunch of errands. I took an injured dining chair to my dear father in law for repair, I delivered the quilt to the auction folks, I found some books I had to return to a friend (see bookcase above!), I dropped off TWO 30-gallon trash bags of donated clothes that have been kicking around the garage for a month to the Salvation Army, I went to the chiropractor (that was purely for me), I filed a Notice of Appeal I had forgotten about in the morning, and then I picked up my children from school at 4:30.

This is where things started to get amazing. I explained to the children I needed to go to Big Lots. BUT, we were not going to get any treats or stuff there. We were only going to get trash bags and a few storage tubs. WHY??? In the car (where I swear our most precious and deep conversations occur), we talked about sacrifice and Lent and removing blocks between our physical life and our mental and spiritual life. Then I got to the "we are getting rid of as much stuff as we can part" and I held my breath. But to my surprise and delight, they said "Cool." So far so good. We got trashbags and storage containers and came home and got to work. This is what it looked like in progress:

I sorted. I stacked. I purged. I trashed. I piled.

The numbers: I donated 104 books, 73 DVDs, and a few other random items on the shelves.

I filled a whole trash bag of recycling of old magazines and papers.

I filled another whole trash bag of actual trash (see that white bag on the right there?)
I also found a lot of things.

I found a treasure, or ten:

I found that some books are so nice, I get them twice...and then I get the video, too.

I found out Puppy is a great helper.

I found out (again, as I find this out daily) that with a little convincing, if I tell my husband something is really important to me, he gets on board, 100%, and encourages and helps me do what I want/need. Here he is patiently pulling out nasty wads of clogged up dog hair from the vaccuum tube.