The great Get Rid of Crap Project has begun. I threw out a trashbag's worth of old clothes today. Stuff that had worn so many holes in it that even I was embarrassed to wear it. I also put aside a few things to give away to Goodwill. Which is frankly a lot more fun than tossing out beloved old clothes that I'd worn to rags. Most of the Goodwill things are clothes that I got as gifts and never wore because for one reason or another they made me feel unbelievably frumpy. I don't do frumpy.

The only thing in the Goodwill pile I'll really miss is my keen red wool blazer. But it doesn't fit anymore, and it's too heavy to wear most of the year here anyway.

I also threw out a bunch of stuff on my desk. Yikes. There's a lot more where it came from. I am a natural hoarder of papers, and have of late contrived to pile a mass of stuff that needs to be filed on top of the lid of my file box. Where it prevents me from opening the box, and filing things. Ooops. I'll have to fix that.

Let's see: what else did I do this weekend? Slept a lot. Did some laundry. Played a bit of Kingdom Hearts and a bit of Final Fantasy IX on the PlayStation. (Yup, Final Fantasy IX. I guess I'm working my way backwards through the series. So far, IX has a killer visual sensibility, even given the relative crudity of its PlayStation 1 graphics versus FFX's PlayStation 2 graphics, but doesn't yet have the same kind of narrative grip as FFX. Which, frankly, is kind of a relief. )

I read Jeff Vandermeer's Veniss Underground, which I thought had great atmosphere and inventiveness, but didn't quite work for me overall. I didn't always find the characters sympathetic, and the prose style grated on me intermittently. (I found this a bit odd, since I normally fall for writers who use language as exuberantly as Vandermeer does, but there were times when he struck me as going for atmosphere or mood at the expense of precision.) Still, if you're looking for something different, Vandermeer's definitely got it. And the decapitated bioengineered meerkat assassin named John the Baptist is certainly going to stick with me. (In a good way, mostly.) I'll be reading more of Vandermeer's stuff.

I also re-read Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint, to refresh my memory before reading The Fall of the Kings. (Not that The Fall of the Kings looks as though it actually requires intimate knowledge of the events of Swordspoint, but I'll take flimsier excuses to re-read Swordspoint.)

And that, as they say, is that.