Life, Revealed

Today I am home, having done all of two days at work. I get so exhausted there, and no matter how much I sleep (and I have been getting in excess of seven hours a night), I am tired and I hurt. So today was a planned day off, tomorrow there is a big retirement party at the Library for one of my most favorite colleagues, and I want to be able to participate.

So today, I took on a project: trying to dig out my home office, which has been a mess pretty much since I moved into it in June 2004. I moved boxes of "stuff", work product from my consulting days, samples of things I have written, letters, etc. Not to mention several boxes of memorabilia, a nice name for the stuff of our past lives. Today, I was determined to fill up some of those huge black sturdy bags, the kind people use when they mean business.

Some of it has been pretty easy, old brochures, booklets, lots of materials I picked up here and there, on HIV and other topics, that have been kind of dormant in my life here. And most of the information is online, with better and more current statistics, should I need them.

Then I unearthed a box of personal stuff: a journal, half filled, from 1987-1988, so those of you who remember me then can only imagine the contents of this journal! It was an interesting read, I tended to write only when in angst mode, so it is full of self-questioning, painful feelings of love not quite returned, etc. You know, the usual.

Then I found them: letters from the various women I was dating in that time period. Or whatever you would call what we were doing. These were fun to read and then, without a minute of regret, tear up and shove into the large plastic bags. I did find some from a young woman I had simply forgotten I had corresponded with. She poured our her heart, sending me poetry, long letters (remember, this was before email and blogs). I am assuming I wrote similar ones to her. I can only hope she has lost or destroyed them. But they were a little diversion in this project and then, like pretty much all the years of thank you and birthday cards I had saved, I purged them too.

That part of my life seems so long ago. OK, it was that long ago, about 20 years and I was a 30-something woman with no child to care for. And evidently a lot of time on my hands for fun stuff. It was nice to read the letters, remember that time in my life and move on.

This project will hardly be done today, but I did make a significant dent in it. The ultimate goal was to organize materials for taxes for both last year (yes, I have an extension) and for 2007. With all the medical bills I have, I need to be better organized to submit information for taxes. Doing it this way is too hard. So I am attempting to rectify a bad situation and make it better for the future as well.

I do have to leave the house at some point to go to Costco before the masses do. I have a couple of things, including something for work tomorrow, to pick up. So in a few hours I will get out of here for a bit and get there.

Cannot believe tomorrow is Friday, this week has simply slipped away.