Shopping - not as much fun as it used to be

Life's been rather stressful lately. I'm expecting to move house, to a very small place. This means I've been sifting through 16 years of family bits and pieces and trying to get rid of quite a lot of furniture. It's been interesting - I realised that I need to handle every single item in the house, and make a decision about each one. I've been doing well, there have been numerous trips to the dump, two local charity shops stocked almost entirely with our things, and Freecycle devotees have been coming round regularly to dismantle wardrobes and shelves. As well as all this, my mother's house, which I let on her behalf, has (for complicated reasons I won't go into here) required complete refurbishment. So I have been project managing that and doing runs to the dump and so on for her house as well. This has coincided with the busiest time of year at work. No peace for the wicked, as they say.

This decluttering of my life has been liberating. I was very surprised to find the only thing I felt slightly traumatised about getting rid of was the family collection of about a cubic metre of Lego. I started to sift through it, meaning to take only a small box of the more interesting bricks and little people to keep, but as I started to put to one side spacecraft engine parts and gears, I realised I couldn't let it go. Weird. It's not like I'm going to sit and build a spaceship or pirate island any time soon (although that might be quite soothing, thinking about it).

All this sorting and removing and clearing and decision making has meant there is no point in my buying more material possessions. Instead, yesterday on a shopping trip, I ended up in an ironmonger buying flea powder and mouse traps. Not for myself I hasten to add, but for my mother's house (the last tenants weren't the sort of people you would have back in a hurry - astonishingly, one was a student health visitor). It's not the same as the sort of shopping trip where you can do a 'show and tell' when you get home.

The bad news is that now I have to go to my mother's house and set the mousetraps and squirt the flea powder everywhere. I feel very sorry for the mice (who I am rather fond of) but as friend pointed out, I can't use a humane trap, as between visits the poor little creatures would starve slowly, which we decided would be worse. I was tempted by the sonic repelling machine, but as the house has new windows, there is no where for them to escape, so they would end up being driven mad. Life is full of difficult choices at the moment, the mode for murdering mice, and whether to keep a Lego shark and octopus.

I wonder whether the shark would like a trip into outer space?

I hope the sale goes through now, otherwise I am going to be rattling around in a large, and mainly empty, house.

Freecycle is brilliant by the way, and the people who have been coming round seem to be really good types, who I have enjoyed meeting.