A new direction

Some big books that get no lovin' in our home.

Speaking of cleaning up clutter . . .  sometimes cleaning up means acknowledging a change in the way you live.  For example, consider these large atlases and smaller telephone books.

We've hung onto these books for years, storing them near the "mail center" just off our kitchen.  The U.S. road atlas is dated 1997, in fact -- the year we got married.  And I keep tidying up around them, neatening the stack of phone books we store along with them.  Our tiny church directory and school directories are dwarfed by these behemoths.

And after about the 27,345th time I straightened these up, it finally struck me.  I never use them.  Never. I use our church and school directories a bunch, but the yellow pages and atlases?  No.

I pulled them out of the stack and told my husband that I'm going to get rid of them.  His immediate reaction was, "but we might USE them if we take a long trip . . . "  but even before he got to the end of his sentence, he had convinced himself of the reverse " . . . but we actually wouldn't".  We either go get a fold-up, current map from AAA, or we look things up on line.  And the phone books?  Again, the internet is our favorite way to find a place.

Bill Cosby may or may not agree, but we've decided there's not always room for yellow (books).  We'll let our typing fingers do the walking.  We're shrugging off the atlases.  Yeah.