How the hell do I have so much stuff?!

Well, WE ARE MOVED IN! Which is a wonderful feeling of course, although I didn't really feel home until I got my bed set up (first night was spent with the mattress on the floor, not even on the box spring). But our apartment currently looks like a storage unit. Boxes boxes everywhere. I hadn't anticipated having that many boxes at all. A year and a half ago I moved to LA in a 4 door sedan. My mind seems repeatedly boggled by the question "how do I have so much STUFF?!". It's rhetorical, cause I know the answer, but I still can't quite fathom it. Shopping, of course, and BOOKS. Every time my mom has come out here or I have gone to visit two suitcases full of my stuff from Chicago were carted out to LA as well. So I might have moved here with a car full of stuff, but my stuff kept slowly coming in other ways.

I am not alone in this. Holly has lots of stuff too. We have so much STUFF. And I didn't purge before the move because I am a terrible terrible packer and I was stressed enough already. So I vowed to purge as I unpacked. "Less is more" and all that. Unless we are talking about books. Because less is not more with books, more is more with books, and thus I spend time drooling over glorious wall to wall bookshelves in various homes (I grew up in a house full of books, with wall to wall bookshelves in the living room, the study, and bookshelves in the basement and in my room and my brothers room and so on and so on and so on, we are a big reading family, I was the kid under the blankets with a flashlight until 3am, except when my mom caught me and took the book away so I would go to sleep for the night).

But everything else... well, my dvd collection is largely consolidated in flip books now so they don't take up that much space. But boxes and boxes and boxes... as my mom always says "stuff begets more stuff". Somehow, even when you give away a bunch of stuff, more stuff just fills in the gap.

My goal for 2013, as I keep saying, is "DO MORE THINGS", and I'm all for keeping it simple. But as a side thought, one of the ways to afford to do more things is to buy less stuff. So I think I'll keep that thought going as well.

As for the stuff I have now... I'm thinking about doing a modified version of the 100 Things Challenge. I'll talk about that if I decide to go ahead with it.