Time and loss

My work office is a mess. I moved out of the old one and into the new in August, in media res: trying to pack, unpack, plan, and start a new semester all at once. However, the most immediate chores always win the Bitty's Time Sweepstakes, so the clutter just keeps cluttering.

Little by little I unpack and rearrange: a pile, a box, an envelope here and there. I recently came across an envelope of photos that were formerly taped to my old office's wall and in them was a particularly beloved one of Grammie and her lifelong friend Reeney (who deserves a post all of her own someday), taken in my kitchen on May 20, 1995. (I know this because once upon a time I properly labeled my photos...). At the time, Grammie was a robust 82; Reeney was a few years older. I propped the photo in front of the monitor.

Looking at it today, I realized that it really is a record of the past: Reeney died in 1998, Grammie last year. I threw away the miniblinds a few months ago, and the chairs the ladies are sitting in now wait in my living room for me to take them to the local women's shelter thrift store this weekend. The only tangible objects in the photo still in my life are the door handle that peeks out from behind the blinds, the coffee mug in front of Reeney, and the blouse Grammie is wearing. (I kept a suitcase full of her blouses, a time capsule that comforts me even though I haven't opened it once since I packed it over a year ago.)

The things and people that surround us seem so permanent because we see them day after day.

And then suddenly we look around and everything is different.

The Virtual Refrigerator

I'm on a purging, reorganizing, and redecorating kick. I've been at it in fits and starts for a while, but still I'm spending a good part of every weekend getting SOMETHING done.

Standing in my kitchen, holding a piece of paper not nearly as important as a birth certificate, but something I knew I ought to keep -- a flyer full of info from my garbage collector -- my urge was to put it on the refrigerator.

But another of my goals is to stop loading up the fridge with paper. I saw a great idea on HGTV's Mission Organization a week or so ago: attaching thin metal magnet boards inside kitchen cabinets for this kind of stuff. I forget what the woman used, but I think a piece of flashing might do the job if it's made of the stuff that magnets love. But that's for another day.

Today my problem was the garbage flyer and I was stumped. To make matters worse, it sat outside for a few days and is weathered and dirty. If I put its dirty self in a file folder, I'd forget all about it, defeating the purpose of saving it.

And then I thought about putting it "on" the computer.

I created a folder for my desktop, labeled it "Virtual Refrigerator," scanned the flyer, put the scan in the folder, and threw the original away.

Problem solved. The folder will be in my face all the time, just like the front of the fridge is. Going forward I'll scan all those things that fall into that "refrigerator" category, and I'll look at the Virtual Refrigerator at least once a week to see if I still need the stuff that's in there. And I'll know where that kind of thing is.

Best part? I have a big hard drive. It'll never get too cluttered.

Why didn't I think of this sooner?

Waste

I've come to see my daily trip to the mailbox as the garbage run.

I go to the box, come inside, sort through that which should be shredded and that which should go straight to the recycling bin. When life is overly busy, this can pile up for a few weeks. This week I took note of how much actual necessary mail I received. It came to exactly two items: a bill (which can't be received online) and my W-2 (which actually can).

So --
we're cutting down trees
burning fuel to manufacture all this junk
burning fuel to deliver all this junk
burning a tiny bit of electricity each time I run the shredder
burning fuel to take the stuff to the landfill (where the recycling center is).

No wonder our environment is hurting.

People hate spam, but I don't. I use a Hotmail address for all my business transactions, and my spam accumulates there, where I deal with it at my leisure. I'll take spam over stuff that exists just for the purpose of going to the landfill.

What a waste.

My Cluttered, Cluttered Heart: Part One of an Endless Series

I recently joined AARP. Yeah, I'm getting old, but AARP started soliciting me when I was in my early 40s. Now that I'm 53, I decided that heck, it's only $12.50/year and this group lobbies for a lot of things someone like me, a boomer who is eligible for full social security benefits in less than 13 years, cares about.

So far I haven't done much with the membership, but I have received my first issue of AARP: The Magazine, which is a surprisingly hip publication. At least as hip as we old types can handle. In it appears the article "Conquering Clutter," which is (obviously) also available here online. As I read it, my brain went ping-ping-ping. You see, my bloggy friends, I am a clutterer.

I knew that, of course, but reading the article felt much like the first time I read a detailed description of my sun sign, Libra, egged on by my friend F. How could these strangers know so much about me?

From the AARP article, we find this link to The National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization. I am somewhat relieved to find myself exhibiting mostly Level I traits, with a sprinkling of traits from Level II. (Click on the "clutter hoarding scale" PDF icon to see what I'm talking about.) And I only have significant clutter in more than two rooms because (1) Tall Son has never cleaned out his former room and (2) my kitchen is cluttered with unhung cabinets. Again, waiting on Tall Son to hang them. Those two rooms aside, I only have one truly horrific room that I would not let anyone see even if it were on fire. But I sound rather defensive here, don't I?

The article mostly discusses the difficulty older people (older, it seems, even than me) have giving up their artifacts. I, too, have that problem, but I've had it my whole life. I had little of any value as a child, and since I've been poor or struggling most of my adult life, giving or throwing something away has often seemed like a sin.

I might need that thing some day, after all. And then I'd have to buy another.

Friend Alanna surely will find this as interesting as I did (bolds mine):

At Level I and Level II the sins of the chronically disorganized are detailed [in the document previously mentioned]: “slight narrowing of household pathways; unclear functions of living room, bedroom; one exit blocked.” It is these minor offenders—the “common clutterers”—that Terry Prince, a Sacramento professional organizer, tries to help. Prince teaches clutter-control classes and workshops for the chronically disorganized, and she’s made her own observations of the species during her career in the field.

“Clutterers are interesting,” she says. “They’re creative. They’re people with a lot of interests.” About one in three of her students, she points out, are teachers—notorious compilers of paper clutter—and many others have craft hobbies, along with an unrealistic number of projects in process and a large backlog of supplies and materials for which they claim, “I’ll get to that someday,” a familiar clutterer’s refrain. “If that’s what you’re hearing,” Prince says, “you’re in trouble.”

But I'm working on my trouble. It's not a New Year's Resolution; it's a Life Resolution. It's something I've been working on slowly for a while, and I'm trying to be more conscious about and focused on that work. When I'm busy with school, however, it's tough. In the quieter time between semesters, holiday trip notwithstanding, I've been working on it. Last week I took my old microwave cart and some kitchen castoffs to the local women's shelter thrift store. As I drove away and saw the cart in the rearview mirror, a cart I had painted to match my cabinets, and which had served me well for about 10 years, I felt an irrational pang of guilt for abandoning it. I felt the same way when I threw the old stove out in November. It still worked, after all. Never mind it was in dreadful condition.

What I do need to keep around, I'm working on organizing better. My insanely slow kitchen remodel is part of that plan. And today I went to Bed, Bath, and Beyond and purchased a set of "risers" for my pantry cans. I was skeptical that it would do the job -- the little steps looked too small -- but indeed it did, at least for the average and small cans. So perhaps I'll be out tomorrow after another set. And I'm working hard on getting rid of two things for every one thing I bring into the house. Let's see how I did today:

• Brought in can "risers" for the pantry (see photo below); last week I threw away half a tall kitchen bag of expired foods, a job I obviously haven't done for over a year. So, far I'm on the good side of the equation. (And I got the risers in part so I could SEE what I have and use it.)
• Brought in four little votive candles. I've been burning away on the big candles lately and am burning one of the new candles as we speak, so I consider this as a wash. This is a consumable that I actually do consume frequently.
• Brought in a bath "brush" with netting. This may be a waste of money if the netting doesn't stay on the brush, but we'll see. Excuse me a minute. Ok. I threw away the old worn-out bath "pouf." And since when I went to BB&B I returned a drawer organizer that didn't work out, and I mailed my old digital camera to First Grandson today, I declare myself a good anti-clutterer, at least for the day.

Revised to take out old photo and add new photo of the two most organized shelves in the pantry with the second riser (the larger one on the right) now happily settled in.