Before...

After 15 minutes:

Another cow has been added.  Can you find it?

Small Stuff: Roundup

Once again, I spent 15 and only 15 minutes in the laundry room clearing out stuff.  I decided to make a game of it and continue picturing all the cr** as cattle waiting to be rounded up and put out to (someone else's) pasture.  Here's a little cow I decorated to keep me company and make me laugh.  It's kind of blurry.

Cleared 2 baskets of clothes and blankets.  Stuff that was good enough to donate went straight to the washing machine as all was musty and wrinkled.  The ratty stuff went to trash.  There's a noticeable piece of floor showing!

 /

 And now I can see a couple of the boxes that are at the bottom of the mountain.  That one that says UNITED?  It's been sitting there since we moved to this house in 1993 and the stuff in it (I think) is from our move from Arizona to Maryland in 1991.  I'm thinking after 20 years there is nothing in there that I can't live without.  We shall see!

Small Stuff: Thinning the Hoard

I'm having fun playing with the word "hoard".  When I say it I think of "herd" as in cattle.  It's a fun way to think about all the stuff in my house...a herd of stuff stampeding out of control.  

I don't really feel like a hoarder since I no longer bring stuff in...seems to me I've just been maintaining the herd.  But, ta da, the round up has begun.  I am thinning the herd.  There are no sacred cows here, everything is up for elimination.

Today I spent 15 minutes with the most awful area of the worst of the worst room, all rooms and areas having been inventoried and ranked.  Now that was an eye-opener!  I ended up with pages and pages listing all the areas of out of control stuff.  Which is of course, all the areas in the house.  So now the herd of stuff is just a list instead of some ephemeral overwhelming thing hanging over my head.

Here's a pic of the area in the laundry room that beat out the competition for title worst of worst.  I'm not sure it really is the worst...

This pic doesn't show the tiny area I worked on today so you'll have to take my word on it that there's less stuff than before.

Progress

I must keep reminding myself...if I want to be a writer, I get to write.  So here's a progress report for things that are going well in the less is more experiment.

Driving less has been a tremendous success!  Darling man and I had been contemplating moving to having one care to share instead of one each.  Life intervened to speed the decision along <smile> his car died about 6 weeks ago.  I have adjusted to riding the bus for most of my day to day travels (that sounds so much more interesting than going to school and work)  I enjoy it for the most part, it's convenient, free and it affords me lots of time to read.  Sometimes I read for school but mostly I'm reading books that have been hanging out unread on my bookshelves.  Plus once they're read I can pass them on out of here!

I still use the car for errands, shopping and going to night class, just takes a little planning.  So we are saving money on gas and upkeep with only one car which has helped the Small Money project.  Also on that front the weekly cash allowance is working, too.  I established some rules, like if I have money left over one week, I get the difference the next so I start each week with the same amount.  I am happily surprised at myself that I've kept this up consistently for almost 3 months!  Yay, me.  I have enough money to pay for next semester's classes.

Clutter-wise everything is still a mess.  But, there is progress on the horizon, I think.  I signed up for an on-line class to get help with getting started.  I know that Small Stuff will happen.  There have been some false starts and this may be another but I figure that as long as I don't give up, it WILL happen.  I will discover if less is indeed more!

 

Small Diversion - Going off Topic

As you can see, I haven't written anything in quite awhile.  It started as frustration with making no progress on the clutter front.  Then it became self-perpetuating silence.  The more I don't write, the more I can't write and so on and so forth, blah, blah, blah...

For the past 6 Mondays darling man and I have been going to a writing class offered by the local recreation department.  I was hoping it would shake something loose so I could start writing here again.  I mean, seriously, there are so many thoughts in my head that I want to let out.  Anyway...finally for the last class tonight I was able to put some words to a thought.  So I'm going to share it here as a Small Diversion with, hopefully, more to come.

 Heartbreak

There are a lot of ways to answer the question “Who was the first person to break your heart?”  I could be cute and say Ricky in second grade who gave me a Cracker Jack ring but then took it back so he could give it to Valerie.  I could be dramatic and talk about any of the guys who said “love” but left anyway.  How does a heart get broken anyway?  I think perhaps, every time, I’ve broken my own heart and blamed the other.

It seems to me, the times when it feels like my heart is breaking, I am holding so tightly to my idea of how things should be that my poor heart, always alert to danger, becomes a tense, brittle thing, easily shattered when those expectations are not met.

I recently watched a film clip of a young man picked up and tossed a quarter of a mile in a tornado.  He had no broken bones, no internal injuries.  The reason for his amazing survival?  Having first been knocked unconscious, his body was completely relaxed as it tumbled through the air and slammed to the ground.   

There is a lesson here, I think.  If I relax into life, into the moments, if I keep my heart open and soft, it might get bruised but it cannot be broken.

Small Money

I have put myself on a budget in an effort to save part of each paycheck.  After adding up the expenses that come out of my paycheck, I now have a weekly allowance for "spending money".  Up to now I have been going paycheck to paycheck and not keeping up at all with what I'm spending on.  Mostly food by way too much unnecessary stuff.  So, a specific amount in cash for the week and when it's gone, I'm done spending!  

Found an interesting website that encourages saving by not spending.  PiggyMojo lets you set a goal for saving money and then text or tweet the $ amount whenever you decide NOT to make an unnecessary or impulse purchase.  Fun concept though I didn't sign up since it'd be just one more thing to keep up with.  But, hey, just thinking about not spending as saving is proving helpful to my Small Money efforts because I'm choosing not to get the junk food or whatever more often than before.

Another Small Money effort is getting by on $30 gas / week for the car.  Some weeks it's a stretch but it's been 4 weeks and so far so good.   I'm more intentional about what I go and do.  I spend less on stuff I don't need or really even want because I think twice before going out.  I really want to see if I can keep it up so I've checked the bus schedules and it looks like that will work out fine for the 2 days/week I have classes during the day. (Classes start tomorrow)  And I save by not spending because the bus is free with a student ID!  There will be a new car trip for a once a week evening class so we'll see how that fits in.