A Final Flurry of Activity

I made good progress on yesterday's epic to-do list. Today's is just as long, but I already have a good start, and a lot of the items are things I just have to set in motion, and then I can do other stuff in the meantime. Mostly, I'm baking. I have two pies to make for Thanksgiving. I have the dough for one crust made and chilling.

I've figured out that a lot of the clutter in my office now comes down to two things: stuff that I need to shred (that got pulled aside in recent purges) and books I need to get rid of. I made a good start on both yesterday, taking two bags of books to the library for the Friends of the Library book sale and getting a few years of old tax documents shredded. You only have to keep seven years, and I had twenty years. I still need to figure out what to do with the extra foreign editions. My neighborhood has a large Asian population, so I bet I could donate a set of the series in Japanese. Then I'll need to talk to some teacher friends to see if the German department in the high school would be interested in a set in German. I'm not sure what to do with the Dutch books, as they don't seem to teach Dutch in the local schools and we don't have much of a Dutch community here (if I had some Finnish or Swedish copies, that would be nice because those are the other two ethnic enclaves in my neighborhood).

I also have some stacks of boxes I was planning to take to the recycling center, but now that I'm planning to move, I probably ought to hang onto them. I should probably use them to pack up stuff I need to keep but don't really need to use in the next few months, and then I can stash those boxes out of the way.

After probably a final flurry of activity tomorrow, I'll be at my parents' house for the holiday, where my main tasks will be helping in the kitchen, communing with the horses in the pasture behind my parents' yard (they see me out there and come over for nose scratches) and playing with my brother's dogs.

And then, I have a book to write.