our time capsule a.k.a. cleaning out the filing cabinet

Being as it's the new year and all and seeing as how I just invited about 50 people to come by our house to celebrate Benjamin's birthday in two weeks, I decided it was finally time to clear out the filing cabinet that narrows our already-narrow hallway and probably breaks some sort of fire code. I've been dreading it for months now, ever since it moved from the room that was going to be an office but became Benjamin's room instead (back in September... ahem). 

It's really hard to commit to such a project because I never know how long I'll have when Benjamin naps: half an hour or three hours or sometime in between. And it can be so frustrating to finally get the momentum to start a big project only to be completely halted twenty minutes into it, papers and folders and whatnot scattered all over the floor ready to be crumpled, ripped and eaten by said child. Today the stars must have been aligned, though, because Benjamin took one of his three hour power naps. Either that or he's getting sick, right? Please not that. 

I pulled so much s-h-i-t from that filing cabinet it's not even funny. The thing must've dropped a good twenty pounds. Amazing the stuff that gets sucked into that vortex. It's like the door of the refrigerator; stuff always goes in but not much comes out (not until you move and have to throw away many bottles of random condiments that you used a teaspoonful of in one recipe three years ago.... sorry, I digress). I found papers from before Fraser and I were married (7 1/2 years ago), sale papers from his old condo,  years of EOB's from 2010-present, manuals from appliances we no longer have (or never recall having at all...hmm...). Ye gads!

Cleaning out something like this feels really daunting at first but once on the train, it feels so good to take whole piles of papers and, without even having to look closely at them, chuck them in the shredder. Wow. Talk about satisfying. At this point, I'm 80% done. Two and a half drawers out of four, done (does that match my percentage, cause I just picked the percentage based on feel). The only trick now is to tackle the last 20(or whatever)% soon before I completely forget where I left off and have to start all over again. Which is a more common occurrence than one might think. Then we can move the blasted thing and be able to move down the hallway without having to turn sideways for fear of knocking a picture off the wall. Yay! Progress, people, progress.