end the clutter

New Year's Eve-2009

in order to put away the new christmas things we got like running shoes for me, a 6 quart sautee pan for clark, wolverine's retractable claws for Elliot..I had to go into the closets, the basement, the storage area above the tv room and try to make room for more stuff-first I got frustrated and kept rearranging to make space. Then I get mad and start sorting out piles of junk...why do we have 4 old pair of snowboard boots that don't fit anyone? why do we have headphones for cd players? we have approximately 40 pillow cases and most of them are from before we had the money to care about thread count so they are like resting on sand paper..usually when i get a little pms i get into these cleaning modes and i throw out things that are clearly garbage-folding chairs that don't fold anymore, a chinese checkers board with no marbles (people you are never really going to go out and buy new marbles for that board-learn to let it go) and of course there is always clothing that is so tattered that even Goodwill won't take it.

This idea has been coming for sometime. I have a friend to recently told me about Freecyle. It's a website for posting things that you want to get rid of or asking for things you need. She placed some almost new air conditioners into a new home, and now some radiators too..That got me looking around my house for items that people might use and I have found a few that would be helpful to someone, but what I mostly found was lots of crap that nobody really needs. 11 years ago we had a terrible house fire, and thankfully no one was hurt. We lost some really treasured items in that fire, photos, baby blankets..but there was one blessing in it-when we moved back into our newly rebuilt house we had no junk for the junk drawer!! Really, we didn't have anything that wasn't essential. But junk is like single celled bacteria and it reproduces asexually while you are at work. We have 4 handheld cheese graters. We have an egg white separator. We have 5 calculators, a package of Lord of the Rings action figures that were never even opened, 9 rolls of crepe paper, and too many to count half sharpened colored pencils. Each of these items lives in its own junk drawer with all of its other junk drawer siblings.

So now even though I am so disgusted at my recent weight gain and really do need new clothes-I am not going to go out and shop. I decided today that I will spend one entire year out of the stores. The only things coming into this house are groceries. I asked my husband to help too and he said he would try. He did bring in a new shop vac today but said we can throw out the old one (it has no replacement filters anymore since the model is discontinued so sorry to anyone who got excited that I might post it on Freecycle) but that is it!! I am also going to eliminate stuff every day too. If you already know that you need/want those Lord of the Rings action figures then get ahold of me before they go to Goodwill..