If I don’t tell you, you’ll never know. Last week, while snow-chaos was going on outside for two full days, I actually made an heroic effort (in my own humble opinion) to deal with my own chaos of (mostly) white. (I mean paperwork, not laundry.)
Not only have I managed to reduce the number of notebooks in active use, I’ve also sorted a mountain of various documents which had been piling up over the past 2½ years. I.e. from the day when my father suddenly had to go into hospital and my parents’ whole situation all of a sudden collapsed. (Seven months later mum died. Home care was arranged for dad, and he stayed on in his old home for another year, but last summer he got worse and had to be moved to a group home for seniors.)
Now don’t think I have not been filing anything in the meantime. Actually I sometimes feel like that’s all I’ve been doing the last couple of years! (Well – a bit of blogging in between...) But there has still been this ever growing pile of “pending” stuff that I just never seem to get to the bottom of. Some of it is still pending! But now I’ve filed most of it anyway. Pending or not, there was just no way any more to keep everything on top and within sight. Except possibly to start decorating the walls with it. And I doubt that would have felt very helpful. (I really prefer the wallpaper I got put up when I moved in, just before all this happened…)
There is of course already a new pile growing. Just one day’s average portion of new bureaucratic mail that I couldn’t immediately decide what to do with took care of that…
(Mind you, this was all just paperwork from the last 2½ years. Not the 80 or so years before. That’s all still in The House.)
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Scroll down or click here for my Booking Through Thursday post.
happy for you it is filed away. it always amazes me that i will buy organizers with pockets and spend hours getting it all filed and just like you said the new pile starts. i keep telling myself, when a new piece comes in, file it each time, does not happen. i have a little stand up box thingy and i keep poking it in there so it is not on the counter, when i can't poke anything else in, i go through and file or throw away
ReplyDeleteYes, paperwork seems to be a continual fight. Glad you are finally getting a handle on it!
ReplyDeleteI really don't envy you, Monica. Having been there, done that and got a wardrobe full of T-shirts I still find myself with paper on both sides of the world. However I have the absolute treasure of a friend on Lewis and when I get home Pat has sorted everything and I just have to open a folder and read through everything. Which reminds me. I must open last year's folder when I get home. On second thoughts though if it's remained unread all this time it's probably ok to ignore it now.
ReplyDeletePaperwork overwhelms me. I am obsessed by being on the computer so paperwork just seems to be a thief of time I want to use elsewhere. lol
ReplyDelete