A year ago I was still essentially living in one city while working in another some 200 miles away, which is to say I payed a mortgage at one place (my house) and slept in a different one. (The Modern Beau’s) The company finally moved me to the same city where I was working, but since then I’ve managed to lose track of many of my things.

I couldn’t find my favorite sweater for the first few weeks of the fall season. I lost both my Barnaked Ladies Greatest Hits CD as well as Barenaked for the Holidays. And now I can’t find my favorite winter hat, the only hat I’ve ever owned that was soft, warm, fit perfectly and went with everything.

I hadn’t paid much attention to the fact that my Barenaked for the Holidays album was MIA until a week ago when the holiday music season actually began. It was then that I realized I had neither the Barenaked album nor the mixed CD I made two Christmases ago with all my favorite holiday tunes.

That prompted this:

Also known as The Great CD Reorganization of 2008.

The GCDRo08 is actually something I’d been hoping to accomplish all year, except I couldn’t do it as long as I didn’t have my own place in which to live and spread out my CD wares. I’m awful about putting CDs back where they belong when I’m done listening to them, the result being I have CDs EVERYWHERE.

I have one of those handy CD notebooks that holds up to 400 CDs at a time. Guess what? It’s been full for over a year. I bought another one just like it and thought about shoving all the loose discs in that. I knew, though, that would not make it any easier to locate them when I need them. No, I needed to nip the disorganization in the bud.

The GCDRo08 will involve me of pulling out all the CDs I own, matching them with their respective artwork or playlist, coming up with some sort of logical order that will help me locate them (alphabetical? autobiographical? I haven’t decided) and then shoving them into their new spots in the CD notebooks.

I’m going to pull out the CDs that I have absolutely no use for and turn them in to our really awesome used book and music store for credit towards new CDs/DVDs/books.

The above photo is only a sampling of the CDs that must be sorted through. There’s a whole box full of albums not yetencountered not to mention the 400 CDs already in the first notebook. I do not expect The Great CD Reorganization of 2008 to wrap up until at least well into 2009. Perhaps even 2010.

The good news is, in pulling out just those CDs I found Barenaked for the Holidays. That means my personal Christmas season can begin. The Modern Beau found the sweater in the depth of his closet, and I found the BNL greatest hits album under the passenger seat of my car. I still have not located the hat.

*For anyone who cares how that Christmas party turned out … it was OK. I only knew two gals there, the one who invited me and a gal who I played with on the intramural squads. All the rest were either significantly older than me or came from a different chapter. I caught up with one of the gals I knew, the other one acted like she didn’t want anything to do with me and I made small talk with a few other ladies.

I did get a really awesome ornament in the dirty Santa ornament swap, so there is that.