Project Simplify

It's been awhile, but Project Simplify continues. I have culled more clothes and shoes that have reached the end of their (enjoyable) lifetimes with me. I sold some books to the secondhand bookstore (only to have them replaced with birthday-present books on my shelves! how exciting! new books to read!).

Mostly, I find myself thinking, "Do I need this? It will just clutter my life" with respect to paper. I am inundated with paper, and so my strategy is this: if I need the original copy (receipts, health insurance costs) I file it away neatly. If I need a copy, then I scan it and recycle it: bits take up much less space than physical documents, and are more easily indexed, sorted, and searched! In the end, nearly all the paper I get handed is recycled, which makes me feel honest when I'm around my vegan-eco-hippie friends.

The one thing I can't seem to cull is electronics. I use a lot of them -- many computers and peripherals and gadgets and toys -- and don't want to throw away the less-frequently-used ones, lest they be the missing link in some sort of migraine-inducing file/signal-conversion protocol. (I plug the output of my DS into my laptop, and string the audio from that into my desktop so I can process it with some software there, but send the video through a series of cables to the monitor...)

I recently happened across Eleven Myths of Decluttering and agree heartily with this: "If you get rid of everything you don’t need, you may not need any fancy containers." Of course, a sort of reverse process is happening in my kitchen, where my collection of containers of spices has expanded from by basic post-graduate {salt, pepper, garlic} to a much more sophisticated set.


This post's theme words: avenaceous, "relating to or like oats" and spurtle, "a wooden stick for stirring porridge." Yay goopy, warm autumn breakfasts!

Very comfortable

For my birthday, my very affectionate boyfriend R. kidnapped my bicycle (I was out-of-the-country) and repainted it green. I really appreciated it. Soon thereafter, my bike was hit by a car while locked on the sidewalk outside my apartment.

Boo to cars.

So R. and I went today to fix or replace the squashed rear wheel. After maybe an hour of working on it together, the friendly BikeChain helper T. asked, "Are you siblings?"

We both paused. He said, "... or boyfriend and girlfriend?"

"The latter," I said.

He was flustered and tried to backpedal with, "You just seem so comfortable around each other!" And then he acted like he had something else to do and wandered off for awhile to wear off his embarrassment.

I thought this was very cute.


This post's theme word: absquatulate, "to leave in a hurry; to flee."