Cleaning

This year's Christmas day fell on a friday, and there's no dance class and sunday school this weekend, which means I have 3 days in a row for holiday.^_^ Since 2010 is approaching, and Chinese New Year is not too far away, I better get some of my stuffs cleared up and room cleaned before my usual routine activities resume.
I spent whole afternoon just cleaning my bookshelves and sorting documents that accumulated this year, deciding which to keep or else thrown away. I find it difficult sometimes deciding which items to be thrown and which to be kept. There are birthday gifts from others which I'm not likely to use (for the rest of my life). If they are small in size, I can still keep them but some are rather big to store. You see, the old things are always there, yet new ones keep coming in. I'm left with not much space to store all the things and thus are 'forced' to throw or give some stuffs away. But this is impossible with my books. New books keep coming in, old books can't be discarded, so perhaps I need more bookshelves?
I tried to categorise stuffs that made up my 'garbage'. There are printed materials, booklets, bags etc from attending conferences and workshops, papers and articles that I printed out for research reading purpose, documents like meeting minutes etc. Looks like most of them are papers. So I sorted them into 'coloured' and 'white' for recycling purpose. Present wrapping papers are kept so that I could reuse them.
Hmmm.... I seriously feel that we all need to change our lifestyle to reduce the waste of resources unnecessarily. Keep everything to basic minimal need. Maybe I should start telling friends to not buy me birthday gifts next year onwards or ask me beforehand so that they could get me something useful and not 'ornamental'. Well, books are always a good choice, hehe. (>_^)