Where did it all come from?

Okay, there are just two of us in this house. Two. And, though we don't always act like it, we're both grownups. We don't have kids, just two cats.

With just the two of us in the house, I'm flabbergasted by the amount of stuff we have.

We have too much stuff.

When I was in college, I moved from dorm to dorm so often I got into the habit of condensing my stuff to fit in stacking drawers and boxes. It made moving 1000 times easier. All I had to do was pick up the boxes and move. Everything I owned fit in the back of my pickup.

When J and I were living in an apartment in Richland, we had a lot of stuff, but it was a small apartment. It seemed normal not to have enough space in a small apartment. When we moved, it was staggering to me the amount of junk we had accumulated. I mean, I used to live (happily, might I add), with just what would fit in the back of my Ford Ranger.

It took us many trips with both my Ranger and J's, plus a friend's Toyota Tundra to move stuff from the apartment into the house we bought right before we got married. When we first moved in, we didn't have enough stuff to fill our house. It was spacious and roomy, and life was wonderful. A little more than 1600 square feet seemed luxurious.

Five short years later, I'm shocked by the amount of crap we seem to have accumulated.

Today I started to clean the kitchen and found I couldn't put away coffee cups - the cupboard was bursting at the seams. How on earth did we acquire so many coffee cups? Perplexing, I know.

A quick perusal of the rest of the house shows me quite clearly that the kitchen cupboards are unfortunately not the only ones bursting at the seams.

I think the problem is that both J and I have real issues with getting rid of things that other people have given us. Even if those things are not anything we like or even use. Periodically, I get so overwhelmed with the stuff in the house that I will do a purge and get rid of as much as I can. But that sure doesn't last long. As soon as I get a cupboard or closet cleaned out, there's more junk to take the place of the junk I just got rid of. It's a never ending cycle.

I love my house, and I love my neighborhood. However, we don't plan to stay here forever. The longer we are here, the itchier my feet are getting. I'm almost mentally ready to leave. The problem is that we don't know where we want to go. I can find a job pretty much anywhere in the state of Washington. J, on the other hand, has a much smaller job market available to him. We keep talking, but no decisions have been made and no plans have been set. The only thing we both agree on 100% is that we do NOT want to live in a big city. We like small town life. We like having a big yard and some privacy from the neighbors. In fact, we'd be even happier with just a bit more land. A full acre or two would probably be just about perfect.

In the meantime, I'll keep working on keeping the "stuff" to a manageable level. Wish me luck.