When I first lost my job, I had a moment of panic. Along with my job, we lost half our family income. Even though we have always been very good about living within our means and I had been preparing for this for a couple years, you can't help but worry that you miscalculated somewhere along the way.
One of the first things I did was clean out several closets. These were the places where we hid things that we didn't want sitting out but also didn't have the time to deal with properly. Since I now had my whole day free, I decided to take advantage of all that time and get them organized. It had the added advantage of keeping my mind distracted from other things.
I was amazed at how much could be donated, especially since I had been making regular trips to drop things off at Goodwill for years. After 6 months (exactly) my closets are all neat and organized along with most drawers and shelves but I still manage to fill at least one bag with donations a week.
I never thought it would take me this long to find a job and
I still worry sometimes that an unexpected expense is going to cause my
carefully planned budget to fall apart.
Whenever those thoughts start to overwhelm me, I remind myself that
there are other people much worse off.
The fact that we still own items we don’t need is proof that we are
doing OK. I keep looking for that next
bagful of items because I know that there is someone out there who could really
use this stuff and it seems irresponsible to leave it unused and taking up
space in my house.
This is an extra photo to show that we have our third beautiful day in a row. As proof of how cold this spring has been, these tulips just opened yesterday. This is the first time in 16 years that they haven't opened within a day of my daughter's birthday, April 15th. Better late than never!
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