We've started packing. Okay, that's not quite accurate. We've started cataloging all our worldly possessions, tagging them with the D(ave)-System: bring, store, sell, give. It's incredibly empowering, and frightening, to think that I'm making a decision about the fate of all the things I've acquired over my lifetime in one split moment. In a moment of haste, I could easily miscategorize and tag something sell! Or equally troubling, in a moment of false melancholy, decide to store, only to then pay each and every month to keep an only mildly-wanted item and then be burdened by lugging it around for the rest of forever, obsessing about the sunk cost of keeping it and therefore unable to ever give it away in the future.

Making hundreds of tiny decisions like this over and over again is exhausting.

I'm exhausted and I haven't even started packing.

I've always been jealous of my friends who seem to cull their items to a few highly selected pieces. I want to be that person who has a simple, clean, thing-less bedroom. But I've come to realize that's not me. Somewhere along the line, I decided that having a wrapping paper tupperware -- you know, the long, narrow containers made just and especially for this one, very specific thing -- filled with adorable holiday gift wrap and ribbons -- made me feel like an organized adult. So, I have a giant, specialized plastic bin filled with all kinds of blue and silver, reds and greens and golds. I love my wrapping paper tupperware, and I firmly want it tagged "store." Which of course is hard to justify, when you do the math of what it costs to store that tupperware versus what it will cost to replace it upon our return. To say nothing of poor Dave; he's going to have a heart attack when he reads this post and discovers I want to keep my clear, plastic bin filled with giftwrap.

My challenge goes beyond in-home organization. Books are another prime source for my exhaustion. I've kept a few of my favorite texts from college, books that I haven't gotten around to reading. Hearty references like Our Bodies Ourselves, or What Works for Women at Work. So, what am I supposed to do with all these beauties? I so loooove a deep, stacked bookcase. But I just. Don't. Need. Them. All. My project for today is to tidy up my stacks, and make decisions. Lots and lots of tiny decisions, each one feeling bigger than it really is.

So today, a cold sunny Sunday in San Francisco, three weeks and counting from our departure, I'm trying to balance the desire to purge, need to reduce, and keeping a little bit of Sarah history. Today is about balance.