I Am Becoming a Minimalist!

Have you ever seen the pictures of King Tut’s tomb as it looked the day that Howard Carter first broke through the wall, revealing those objects to the light of day for the first time in thousands of years? Well then, you may see a certain resemblance in these pictures. We too have our precious objects all piled up together. But, although you may not think that it looks as if anything has been done except for dumping, but believe you me (as my dad used to say), there’s been a ton of work done (mostly by Jim) to get this far. And now I’m realizing that I can get rid of a ton. (Might have been nice if I’d realized this before the move, but oh well.)

table on its side, desk piled with files

Rack of clothing and piled up stuff half wrapped furniture with piles of clothes

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Are You a Creator of Order or Chaos?

Right now we are living in the midst of chaos, with our possessions scattered hither and yon, whether downstairs or upstairs or out on the porch or driveway. And that doesn’t even include the main stuff in the pods, which will arrive this afternoon.

I have such a struggle with neatness! That’s why I so need structures—drawer dividers, shelving, cabinets, etc. When left to myself I end up strewing my things all over the place. I have no inborn sense of order and neatness.

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Moving Day Drama

cartoon of man moving a boxSunday evening, May 21: Here I sit on the stairs of our soon-not-to-be-ours house, and I’m so tired that this is the only thing I can do. It’s too early to go to bed, I don’t have any books I want to read, and there’s no TV. And pretty much no internet, although once in awhile I can get a faint waft of Xfinity wifi. So I’m writing a post! Aren’t you flattered!

What a day! And we’re still not done with the packing up and moving, but I think we’re going to be able to walk into closing tomorrow and hand over the keys. There was a point today around 6:30 when I took a look around at all the stuff that still needed to be moved and thought, “We aren’t going to make it.” And then my phone rang, and it was Jim. “Guess who just called me? Jet Movers!” We had decided that we were going to have to hire some movers for the biggest stuff, as we had a wonderful crew but of the guys present we had 

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Do You “Respect Your Possessions”?

Pile of garbageYet another blog post generated from a Gretchen Rubin idea. (I guess at some point I’ll have to start paying her a commission.) She had an interview this week with Marie Kondo, the incredibly successful organizer/declutterer who has now written a second book, Spark Joy. I just went online and downloaded the audiobook from the library, so expect to hear about my going on another ninja clearing-out raid in the days to come, the same thing that happened when I read Kondo’s first book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up

 

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A Funny, Charming Book about . . . Clutter.

Year of No Clutter by Eve Schaub. Follow the link to the author’s website.

Since I’ve been so immersed in political and true-crime podcasts and articles for the past months my book posts have been a little sparse. I spent some time today trying to come up with something to post for this week, attempting to persuade myself that I really was going to read the book I have about the Peloponnesian War. (That may actually happen at some point, as it’s excellently written, and I love the Greeks–did my masters speech recital about them.) But I’m ending up with this audiobook, written by the same woman who wrote a book a couple of years back about going a year as a family without eating any added sugar. I didn’t like that book too much, as I found her premise a bit irritating: that she could go ahead and make sweet things as long as she made them with glucose (sold under the name of “dextrose”) instead of sucrose (which is half fructose). Actually, what I found to be irritating was that because of her I ordered a 50-lb. bag of dextrose and then realized I just didn’t want to use it.

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An Obliger’s Tool

I wrote last week about my struggles to keep promises I make to myself and reach goals I set for myself, as I am a classic Obliger.  Those of us who fit into this category need some kind of outside push to get going, and this push is usually described as accountability.  But, as I said last week in “The Accountability Conundrum,” it’s sometimes very hard to set up that kind of structure.