carbonel

Congratulations on your retirement! That's excellent news about the success of your and Lydy's trip to Paris: it bodes well for future travel. I've traveled a fair bit for years, slowing down quite a bit while I was changing to more sustainable financial habits, but the part about retirement that I really, really like is that I no longer "take the work with me; work wherever I am" as I did for 30+ years of self-employment.

My breakthrough this year on the decluttering front was the creation of Zoom SORT! sessions. So far, they're working well as one-on-one sessions with friends who also want to declutter. We Zoom together for an hour or thereabouts, each with whatever boxes/bins/bags o'stuff, and do the work while visiting, marveling over what we found, making progress. I've been doing them most weeks for about 6 months now and am pleased to be on the last of what I think were 16 boxes full of family stuff that followed me home from my sister's house in 2019. I've shredded a couple hundred pounds of paper with personal information on it. The last box from Sue's are more of her credit card statements, tax filings, and health records.

Let me know if you'd like to try a few sessions in the new year. While going through papers is especially easy on Zoom, it can also be something like "I'm going to declutter this shelf/flat surface/whatever. (I'm overdue for a session with Elizabeth Clement; we planned to declutter our dressers this fall and then I dropped the ball.)

Onward!