Okay, so I blew off doing the cleanup I’d planned yesterday. Today, however, I believe I’ve made up for that lack. I dragooned Kyla into making a trip out to that new Ikea store (with a follow-up stop at Best Buy) and we came home with a few nice-and-cheap storage solutions that I spent the next few hours putting to good use.

There’s a new hanging-shelf piece in my closet, consisting of some Velcro and a collapsible set of fabric shelves. Into those shelves went the various cold-weather pieces I had piled up hither and yon, along with a couple pairs of jeans that used to be wadded up on the closet floor. To make room for the shelving, I weeded out some of the clothing and bedding I’d thrown into the closet over the years. Yes, I actually threw stuff away. Amazing!

I’m also in the middle of migrating my burned-CDs collection from those clunky, hard-to-sort binders into dual-disc sleeves which I’m filing into my new paperboard CD drawers. At $13 per set of two drawers with enclosure, it was too good a solution to pass up. As a side benefit, I’m culling lots of anime that I downloaded entirely for the kids’ sake. That will all go into one of the binders and sent to them for safe-keeping. I’m also burning some DVD-ROM discs to finish out a few series that I managed to botch up the organization of the first time around, or that I simply never got around to tidying up. That aspect of the cleanup project, of course, directly benefits the available disk space on my main computer and the network storage drive. Everybody wins!

To round out the shopping trip I picked up a small, cheap external mouse for the laptop (touchpads annoy me, and a full-sized desktop mouse is a nuisance for mobile use) and a couple of cheap 2GB USB memory sticks. I don’t like the idea of feeding batteries into a wireless device, so my new mouse sports a retractable USB cord instead.

I’m not done yet, of course. I have some laundry to do, more CDs to file and DVDs to burn, and I need to tidy up the explosion of fabric outside of my closet. My sense of accomplishment, however, is quite high. Hooray for organization and cleaning!