Farewell to 42

Tomorrow is my 43rd birthday and it's time to say goodbye to 42. It's been an interesting year with plenty of good stuff, but also a medical problem last summer that really threw me off course. I'm doing better now, but it's an ongoing battle. Medication is preventing the episodes of blindness, but the anxiety remains (though to a lesser degree). I'm still very limited in where and how far I can drive without panicking. It's been pretty awful, actually. I haven't been motivated to do much with my yearlong project to Discover 42. And that's OK.

I had such an amazing time with my 40 Things and Project 41 that it was inevitable that one of my yearly projects wouldn't be quite as awesome. Discover 42 wasn't bad. I did get rid of 42 pounds of stuff and learned a lot of fun facts about the number 42. I watched some cool 42-related movies. Most recently, I've challenged myself to get rid of 42 inches of paperwork and other stuff from the files.

As I mentioned before, we have two filing cabinets that are rapidly filling up because we regularly put stuff in and almost never take stuff out.  I'm slowly going through every file and weeding out everything that can either be scanned and recycled or simply recycled. It is taking a really, really long time. But I am making progress. Visible progress. I decided I would keep going, measuring the discards, until I had discarded a staggering 42 inches.

While donating 42 pounds of unwanted belongings was easy, recycling 42 inches of paperwork is hard and really time-consuming, especially stopping to scan anything sentimental or potentially important and shred anything with private information. For the most part, it has not been fun. But it's been very satisfying to reclaim that wasted space.

Here's what 6 inches of old appliance manuals (that we can now find online) and warranties (long since expired) looks like.

Goodbye, 3" of outdated maps!

Farewell, 1.5 inches of paint chips! 

So long, last 1" of store-bought greeting cards that have been languishing ignored in my craft room for the past decade when I started making my own cards!

I've also said good riddance to really old phone lists, service records for a car I no longer own, recipes featuring ingredients Steve can't eat, and a bunch of other stuff that has no place crowding up our lives. I passed 42" and I'm still going. I'm not even close to done. Ugh. The good news though? Along the way, I found my missing ballroom dance portraits! Hurray!

So long, 42! I'm looking forward to 43. Tomorrow I'll tell you all about my plans.