Yet another reason I'm glad to be a woman...

...is that I don't have to carry all my important stuff in my pockets because I can jam it all into a PURSE!

My friend Deb did a photo documentary about cleaning her purse which amused me to no end, because she had this big roomy purse and seemingly (in my opinion) not a whole lot of stuff that needed to be cleaned out of it.

Which got me thinking about my purse. So I decided to clean it out and see how much stuff I could dispense with. Here's my purse with all it's contents dumped
out in front of it:

I know, you're probably thinking "how does all that crap fit into that purse?", but it does - and I'm able to access everything without dumping my whole purse out.

here's a view from the top.

Mostly it's just receipts and paper stuff that I need to clean out from my purse on a regular basis. Today I had my checkbook because I had to go make my car payment, but otherwise I don't normally carry my checkbook with me. So anyway, I repacked the essentials, sorted through the paper and this is what I came up with to either pitch or put away when I got home.

To the left is my neatly organized purse, then some expired coupons and a couple of sale flyers - my movie stub from seeing 'Corpse Bride' a couple weekends ago - that's the throwaway pile. My checkbook and an envelope with receipts can get put away when I get home. A rubber keychain from the car dealer when I took my car to get repaired last week to put in the big 'junk drawer' I like to call "home". A grosgrain ribbon that was a spritzer sample of my new perfume that I'll tack to my bulletin board here at work. A ballpoint pen that says "I *heart* Longaberger" that I'll also keep at work. My Goddess spell beads that I need to put away at home and some misc. change for the change jar.

Even though the paragraph explaining the piles looks pretty long, that's not really that much stuff compared to all the things I put back into my purse from the big "master pile".

How do guys get away with just carrying keys and a wallet?