I’m on a mission. I decided to clean out the storage shed. Turns out it is not self-cleaning. The dogs won’t listen to me when I suggest it to them and seven years of hubby’s retirement hasn’t resulted in any change.

It’s up to me.

Saturday I spent about two hours working on it. Sunday I lifted, shifted, recycled and trashed for three hours. The recycling stash got quite large. We’ll be taking everything in this week.

I only had the small 13-gallon garbage bags when I started, and that just wouldn’t do. An early-morning trip to Home Depot took care of that. We now have a box of 50-gallon garbage bags sitting on the shelf. The shelf, I might add, of the brand-new shelving unit that I also brought home from Home Depot and put together myself.

Hubby thinks that most of that junk is mine. Seriously? I found Boy Scout badges, recycled size 11 (men’s) shoe boxes, picked up university Russian books from a year that would have put me in 6th grade and re-boxed retriever training magazines from the early ’90s. And that’s just a sample.

I mentioned to hubby on Friday that I was going to start cleaning out the shed. He said, “Okay.”

“Okay” it is, then. And I’ll do it my way: with 50-gallon bags, a new shelving unit, clear plastic boxes, and trips to the recycling center each week. (Probably not what Frank Sinatra was singing about, but if the size 11 shoe box fits …)