Happy New Year, everyone. The dawn of a new year brings with it the usual resolutions: I will work out more (or in my case, at all), I will read more, I will finally ask for that raise... But most of these never happen. Why? Because they're way too ambitious. The secret is to look to something more achievable, something less to do with your physical self and hence not as overwhelming. Something like your home, for example. 
In my home, three long-simmering issues have finally come to a boil: clutter, death traps for impeding baby -- we're having a a baby! -- and unframed vintage maps.
My brother-in-law was over at the apartment a few months ago and
casually dropped the ‘H’ word while surveying our living room. Hoarders.
While we’re not quite into ‘bulldoze the property’ territory, records
and several ever-expanding piles of magazines litter the floor (never
know when I’ll need that 5-year old issue of Esquire), and my desk is less a functional piece of
furniture than an elevated platform for a messy sundry of whatever. De-cluttering is definitely in order.
Something else I never thought of: those aforementioned piles of magazines and records are at perfect
kid-grabbing height. We’ve also got two fairly serious sets of stairs,
including one that even freaks me out. We’ve got some
time before this child is born let alone scampering around, but for me, ‘babyproofing’ has a double
meaning: how do we protect our stuff from the
child? Anyone have any advice on how
to prevent everything in the home from being covered in a thin film of
juice and Dora the Explorer?
One thing in particular that I'd like to save from slimy paws are several boxes of vintage maps. I went through a (Nerd! Alert!) map-collecting phase as a kid, and
managed to acquire lots of old, obscure maps, some of which are pre-space-age era, and are quite bizarre/fascinating. Must get them off the floor and into the wall, but how? Several frames throughout the house? A map wall? Could be fun -- I could direct guests to behold the mystical 'Italian East Africa'...
Hopefully by writing this down for all to read I will be shamed into de-cluttering, baby-proofing and framing some maps before the end of the year. If worse comes to worst, I will
implement blogging Ghost Protocol and pretend I never wrote any of this.
Any words of encouragement?
Paul Beer is a Toronto writer, actor and comedian. You can follow him on twitter @pauldanielbeer. Read his posts every Friday on Slice.ca.
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