Carving away...

Whenever I go to downsize more of the things from my professional past, it feels as if I am carving off pieces of myself and throwing them away (donating, recycling, etc.).  However, I set myself a goal of weeding out my professional books once more. I haven't given a lecture or a workshop or even done a reading in a classroom since I moved here. I doubt anyone would ever be interested in my literacy expertise again.  So, I thought I would pick up that proverbial knife.

I selected 40 books and that ginormous pile of journals on the left for down-sizing.  I have them in piles for ones I thought my friend Mary could use with her children (such as picture dictionaries for young children), ones I wondered if the church school might like (such as ones on using Children's Literature across the curriculum), ones I thought might be interesting to someone at a used book store,  ones I thought one of the two people I know who wish to write for children might like, and two High-Interest, Low-Read books that I should have sent to my sister for my autistic nephew eons ago.  Plus, I have another small pile of Lutheran books to add to the ones I gave my pastor two months ago, when I realized the type of studying those books were for was the type of studying my mind cannot really do anymore.

I still kept the seminal books on the various topics of literacy scholarship.  And I kept all the ones from my dissertation study.  They are the ones that any college library would still have and would most likely reading, such as Louise Rosenblatt's The Reader, The Text, and the Poem.  Keeping them is really like keeping yet another quilt.  You really only need one quilt.  All the rest are just comfort....

The other thought I have had is that I would like to start giving away many of my children's books.  I mean, I no longer need 20 examples of ABC books to bring to workshops.  One or two would be enough for visiting children.  The same goes for the many examples I have among the over 1,000 children's and young adult books I have.  I will keep all the young adult fantasy, because I enjoy reading it.  And I will keep a wide range of picture books, poetry books, non-fiction books, fiction books, and biographies.  But I certainly do not need them all.

I really missed the boat when Mary's beloved was here for his conference. I could have sent a few boxes home with him.

My first project (the one before the downsizing), was to go through all my medications (some of which are pictured here ... purposely blurry) and create a list on my phone that has the refill expiration dates on them.  By that I mean, I wrote out the name of the medication and then the month I would be picking up the last refill.  That way, when I go to my 8-week GP visit, I can check the prescription list to see which refills I will need before my next visit.

My goal this year is to be less "work" for both the pharmacy and my GP's office staff.  The first step in that was to get the pharmacy management contractor for my Medicare insurance company to send all the forms for renewing the pre-authorizations I need on some of my medications.  I managed to get that process finished on January 14th, four days before it absolutely had to be done.

By making this note in the Medical folder of my AwesomeNote app (the BEST app for keeping track of things I don't remember), I will (hopefully) eliminate the need for calling in refills in-between appointments.  In creating the note, I realized that I am already out of refills for Singular.  I see my GP on the 30th, so I will get a refill then.  I am really, really, really glad I did not put off this organization task any longer because I thought Singular was one of the oodles of prescriptions renewed in December.  I was wrong.

Here is my fire from last night.  I really enjoyed it, but did not have one tonight since I spent the evening weeping as I culled more bits of who I used to be.  SIGH.