Friday January 15th

It's my nephew's second birthday! I haven't met him yet, hope I get to before he's grown up :)

Today's declutter: I did quite a few things today, not all of which qualify as decluttering OR cleaning. I bought tulips last week that died pretty fast, but that had a lot of buds, so I pruned off the dead ones and stripped some of the leaves, and put the buds in a smaller vase. I took the tree down and took it out to the curb, along with the flowers, which went over the fence into the vacant lot for fertilizer. I did dishes while waiting for 20 minutes or so for Unemployment to answer the phone. I also swept up all the pine needles and a bunch of dust bunnies for good measure, and put away the decorations.

THEN I started decluttering! I had gotten interested in figuring out a rough estimate of my taxes earlier in the day, and from that decided it was time to get back to my Quicken receipts. I logged 31 cash receipts and then got out my checkbook and started plugging in those transactions. In the end I recycled 35 receipts - five were receipts I'd held cuz I thought they might be debits, and they were, and one was kept for taxes. And I got through a month and a half of checkbook transactions. Spent about an hour on this. I'm leaving the bank recs out so I can continue with this tomorrow.

Results: OMG, I heard from a very old family friend today! It was such a pleasure to read all the news after being out of touch for so long. Some of it was sad news of people I loved passing, but there was also happy news of weddings and new babies. This family had been part of my life since my birth, so I was excited to pass the email along to my mom.

The other good result is, I realized yesterday that I had overreported my earnings to Unemployment last week, so I got on the phone - long wait to get through - and told the lady about the situation, and she corrected my report so that I will get paid for two days! Comes at a very good time, and I'm grateful!