I’m moving.

This is not a reference to a personal household move replete with boxed up clothing, knick-knacks and photos but rather a work-related relocation. Hmmm. On second thought, I guess there is some of that involved with this work move as well. I’ll need to pack up all of my desk top paraphernalia – trinkets, mugs, calendars, cube-wall hangings, family photos and holiday decorations as well as two cover-ups I keep in my desk to ward off the chilly AC environment many of us women are all too familiar with.

After working for eight years in the same west side facility, my new work digs will be downtown. I’m both excited and apprehensive about this change, due to take place later this week. The commute won’t be as far but we’ll face some certain bottlenecks on our drive into the heart of the metro. Parking shouldn’t be an issue and the skywalk system will provide some nice opportunities for lunch time exercise no matter the weather outside. There will be new people to meet, a different routine and some adjustments to be made. Yin and yang, some good, some bad. I’ll be fine.

To prepare for the move, I’ve started some housekeeping tasks that include, among your basic culling–the-herd chores, getting rid of the Day Timer calendar pages I have inexplicably retained over the years. Scheduled meetings, project notes, to do items, lists of what I had to eat and what I did in the way of physical activity each day are scribbled on most every calendar sheet. Sometimes the pages are blank. And occasionally I used them as form of journaling, vacation planning and daydreaming.

As I read through these entries, laboriously flipping over each and every page, I was reminded of how frustrated I’d been just a few years ago, both with work and with my family – situations that have righted themselves somehow and are no longer as much a source of stress as they once were. Or perhaps I’ve just learned to adjust? Some of my scribblings described my Adventures in Baking: a few failures, several delicious successes. A favorite theme, in my journals throughout the years, is What’s Ahead for the Rest of [insert year here]: an enumeration of weddings, graduations, concerts, parties, family gatherings and vacations complete with dates and locations. It’s somehow gratifying to review these check lists and mentally look forward to similar activities yet to come while looking back, reliving events long past.

Decorating ideas, landscaping and furniture placement diagrams, recipes, quotes, photography and blogging concepts, story lines, financial portfolio tracking as well as mundane (yet necessary) doctor appointment reminders – all this information, about me and my life, woven onto paper with pencil, highlighters and pen. So much to sift through here – I don’t know if I can find the time to get through it all.

It’s both fun and thought-provoking to go back in time, one page at a time, to re-examine the minutiae of my life – both on a personal and on a business level – the tasks, events, ideas, projects and plans that filled my days. I no longer use a DayTimer at work but I still journal, jotting down important (and trivial) thoughts, yearnings and observations as they pop into my head. While I’ve never tossed a journal, the time has come to discard these daily calendar pages much as it pains me to do so. However, it is possible, I suppose, that I might need to look up something that occurred way back on, say, Friday, June 5, 2009. Or I might get to wondering what I was doing on Sunday, February 13, 2011.

It could happen. Maybe I’ll just box them up for later…