Last evening we braved Old Town Pasadena to visit the nearest branch of The Container Store, which opened there perhaps two years ago but which we kept forgetting about.

They certainly do have a lot of things in which to put other things, or put things on top of other things, or under, between, within, below, or beside. Pretty acrylic boxes, nice wooden magazine racks, wire shelves and baskets. So much shiny goodness for organizing everything.

See, one of the problems with new baby is that she's going to want her own room, and the only one we have to give her is chock full o' stuff. A few of the options: discard, repack, rearrange, give away, move to another part of the house, rent external storage. We're taking the shotgun approach to all of the above, except for external storage. (No sense paying for a self-store unit to keep the stuff you most don't want, eh?)

Mostly we'll be rearranging stuff elsewhere in the house so that stuff from baby's room can find its way there. This started last night with those bags you put clothes into, then suck the air out of with a vacuum cleaner. They're really cool. We did that with a bunch of winter clothes we keep 'round for visiting back east at holiday time. It's fascinating to watch the bulky bag of sweaters quickly dwindle in size, yet still weigh the same at the end.

We also decided to get rid of about 400 CD jewel cases by storing the discs and liner notes in boxes instead of each in a plastic case. If you want empty jewel cases, let me know. As a side note, I'm going to cull my library somewhat, although most of what goes out will probably be sent to the local public library, I may post a few titles for others to grab first if they want them.