My family is trying to get our home's interest rate down, so a man is coming in a few days to appraise the place. A complete stranger, going through *my* house and *my* room and inadvertantly seeing everything I own, including my fruity works-in-progress art pieces. Gah.

So everybody in my home is cleaning, getting rid of old junk, etc. And it's...interesting, as this is the first time we've really gone through everything since we moved into this house (four years ago). It's like an archeological site - the father you dig down into the junk, the older stuff you find. Lots of "Oh, *that's* where that went"s. I found my Tinconderoga #3 pencil that's been missing for about a year (no reason for mentioning it other than I like saying Ticonderoga).

But there's also a lot of angst as my family suffers from acute Pack-Ratness, and as everybody knows, throwing something away, no matter how useless it is, is against the very moral standards of Pack Rats. Although there is a lot of stuff that feels more like an annoying freeloader than a I-might-use-that-thing-someday-thing. In that case you're kicking the stuff into the dumpster, like Captain Kirk kicking Chistopher Lloyd in the head in the third Star Trek movie, yelling "I! HAVE HAD! ENOUGH! OF YOU!". Which is an incredibly good feeling, by the way. I think it did me good to let those filled-up coloring books from my toddlerhood go. *rolls eyes*

And I am also learning that it's *okay* to throw away old drawings you made in 1996-98 if you don't want them, and surprising as it sounds your mom might not want them either. This actually pleases me quite a bit as almost all my drawings from this time are dumb noodle people with hy00j heads and terrible floppy hands (noodle people being only slightly thicker than stick people and with clothes). I found a few drawings of the main character of an old comic idea I had, a boy genius named Diction, and it surprised me how much he looked like a Sam, if Sam were an 11-year-old cartoon boy. (My comic ideas have inproved now, of course. Now I have a comic about a bunch of slugs.)

Today is day three of cleaning my room, and (hopefully) the last. Today I'm sorting through all of my doodled-on papers that lie around the house, all my arts and crafts supplies, and my Barbie doll collection. Grah.

Qua "At least my closet isn't like Fibber McGee's anymore" rtz