I thought "hey, I know what I need to do, I need to re-organize my minecart setups to be more efficient." it didn't take long for my 2000+ stockpile of prepared foods to turn into 300, as the rest rotted away and turned into miasma. I'm still afraid to trash compact it, because I have no idea if there is going to be a dwarf lying there from point to point. I'll have to wait for the miasma to clear out of the dining room.
On the plus side, I just learned last night that you get more efficient stone usage by making blocks, so I added that to my job list. Yay! Soon (tm) my fort will be largely stone block covered.
In other news, I finally have the last of my injured dwarves out of the hospital, and all my cats and dogs are stored in cages, to later be slaughtered regularly. I'm also going to add more stockpiles to manage my smithing industry, organzing metals into weapons-grade metal, practice-grade metal, decoration-grade metal, coal, and reprocessing (melted items). Fun times to be had!
Update!:
Damn! stupid damn elves. Yes, I blame the death of 4 legendary dwarves and a child on the elves. Here I ordered my butcher to kill a few exotic animals, and apparently they were from an elven caravan - one that was slaughtered by goblins a while ago. So here my butcher runs off to gather a black-crested gibbon to slaughter, and AMBUSH! She was injured, but the baby in her arms was fine. The child that followed her was slaughtered.
Then of course my own dwarves said, in their "that's my friend!" attitude, they said "we gotta go grab that corpse and take care of it properly!" Our Legendary Trader, Legendary Brewer, and Legendary Leatherworker were all slaughtered trying to recover corpses.
Then, to complicate things, we have dwarves throwing tantrums. First a child, who attacked our nurse. Then the Nurse, who punched the expedition leader (our legendary weaponsmith), tearing the brain and "knocking him unconscious" - permanently. Then our miner throws a tantrum and hits our miner. Damn. I lost some of my best dwarves, started tantrums, injured more, and thus forced certain jobs to not be done until a child happens to grow up.