Trading Spaces

Ginger and I are planning to take our symbiotic-ness to yet another level. Now we're going to organize each other's stuff. This comes from an accumulation of problems that we've both had: her office, which causes her feelings of overwhelm at this point, and my computer, which is incredibly disorganized. It didn't start out that way, but over time, I changed computers, over and over, until it has reached the currently annoying level of disorganization.

A good illustration of what has happened to my computer files over the years: Imagine that you moved repeatedly but never really unpacked. You could find your stuff by digging through the boxes, and if there was something you couldn't find, you just bought another one. This is what I have done to my computer.

With each hard drive erase & restoration, I've had to move all of my files to one file folder so that my husband wouldn't have a list of things to save for me. He would just save the folder and do the erase & restore. Well, I never bothered to put things back the way they had been - never unpacked, so to speak.

Then there's my email inbox - I don't know how to set up subfolders, so everything is still there from about 1997 on. Some are still in Outlook from when I quit using it 2 or 3 years ago. Apparently there are ways of organizing email other than by date. Hmmm.

So as you can see, Ginger has her work cut out for her. But this is something that will be fun and easy for her, I think. Oh, I just remembered the digital photos I have saved to my hard drive. Many of them are duplicates, in various folders. Uh-oh. Poor Ginger.

Of course, I may start feeling sorry for myself once I see her office! I'm hoping that she's just blown it out of proportion in her mind. Maybe there's just a little mess in there, and since she hasn't dealt with it in such a long time, it's grown in her mind....well, there's a chance that that's true!