The Olympics of Organizing

It's hard to keep the kitchen clean when the Olympics are on. We're doing a half-hearted attempt...but we tend to be downstairs watching in the evening instead of cleaning up the dinner dishes.

Both regular exercising (Wii Fit Plus) and regular cleaning are on hold for now. Only a week to go and we'll be back into our usual routines.

In the meantime, I'm spending the time in front of the TV organizing our many photographs. We don't have many printed out after 2003 (when we got a digital camera), but we have boxes and boxes of photo albums and loose photos from both our childhoods up through 2003. I took TONS of photos during the three years we lived in Japan.

So far I've filled a grocery bag with photos that will be recycled. I've decided to forgo the traditional photo albums and instead use photo storage boxes. I still have about eight brand-new photo albums, and I'm not sure what to do with those. I'm thinking that it's unlikely that we would sit and go through photo albums, and I'm finding it very difficult to keep photos organized in albums (not to mention all the space they take up!). I will often pull photos out of a particular album, and then they rarely find their way back into the correct album. With a photo-organizing box, I'm hoping it will be easier to keep track of them.

Right now I'm pulling the photos out and organizing them in Ziploc bags with dates. It's fun to see some of the old shots, but I'm amazed at how many duplicates or similar shots I have, or photos of people whose names I can no longer remember or have since lost contact with.

Mike's using the Olympics time to keep up with the laundry. We so rarely watch TV, but we're using the time with multitasking!