The new Ikea catalog came today. This is always fun: looking at the new affordable household perker-uppers, fabrics, lamps, and storage gizmos. But this time it was all somebody else’s fantasy. We are here for eight more months and then comes the tag sale, the storage room, and the trip abroad with one suitcase. 

I love catalogs but now am recycling the early Fall glossies with barely a glance. Our focus now is on living lean, minimalizing, offloading, getting rid of as much as possible. Sometimes I rip things out of the closet and into the Goodwill bag. Other times I glance at piles of papers and whatnots stacked beneath desks and end tables and just ignore them all. The time will come. But the reality is that the time is coming, really, really fast.