Heaps of Recycling and More Shredding

I have an area enclosed by wooden boards for recycling cardboard in my basement.

Small cardboard pieces go into a blue recycling bag and are put out on the curb for the local recycling truck to pick up every two weeks, but all the other cardboard boxes are tossed into a heap on this area where they have been steadily accumulating into an enormous heap for months.

Some of them I collected from the moving days of two of my friends--I put aside some of their sturdier, uniform-sized boxes for flea-market stock storage, and also a number of others of varying sizes in case I start selling things on Ebay again.

Well, I've still kept a few but I got rid of enough flattened cardboard to entirely fill my car's trunk (forty boxes worth) and took it a cardboard drop-off bin.

Gone!

I've also almost filled another recycling bag with more shredded paper from the computer desk.

Jeff and I went through a few more drawers and some of the paper got refiled, but most of it got tossed. One drawer is almost completely empty.

How Do These Bad Clothing Decisions Happen?

You know when you see an item and instantly feel a deepseated urge to possess it?

Once upon a time I went to a home fashion party (specializing in lace and frou-frou) and admired a floral tapestry jacket. It was patterned blowsy pink and gold roses and green leaves and made of a stiff fabric with brass buttons.

(It was the early nineties, so let's ignore the fact that such an item is now hopelessly out of fashion. )

I wanted it. I liked the way it looked on me. I went to a second party and still wanted it. I don't recall the price tag, but back then I had very little cash to call my own so let's call it relatively expensive.

When I ended up getting the jacket as a present from Jeff I glowed with happiness!

And yet I've worn it perhaps five times in the last fifteen years. It's been sitting at the back of the closet accusingly for the past decade.

I've decided to give it away in the local charity clothing drive. It is sitting awaiting its fate in one of four big yellow garbage bags sitting out in the garage.

Why? Why did something I hankered after so much lose its shine when I actually owned it?

I just don't know, I sighed deeply to Jeff. I thanked him again for getting it for me. It made me happy once. But I just know I will never wear it.

Well, I can partially justify letting it go because it is sized XS, which I am no longer --I could wear it but it would be deeply uncomfortable to stretch out my arms or button it up properly.

But its more about I am NOT a floral-tapestry kind of person. I don't think I was even back then.

I'm afraid there are a lot of ultimately bad clothing decisions lurking in my closet even now. But I've whittled it down to fewer.

For instance, here are four bags of clothes. Jeff started the purge first and collected two bags of clothing items to give away, and I decided to match him.

The Contents of One Drawer

This is not actually the entire contents of one drawer stuffed full of papers in the computer desk--it's just the things that are immediately obvious to me that I don't need to keep.

But at one time or another I thought I did. It's interesting to me how my perceptions of what is valuable change. It's time to start taming the Paper Tiger one drawer at a time..

So now, as I list each paper item, they(most of them) are going through the shredder and then into my paper recycling bag. My rationale for shredding is that you can't change your mind. If it's shredded, it's gone. Ollie North and the Iran/Contra Affair taught me that if nothing else.

1) a folder detailing properties for sale in France--one day, who knows, but these homes are not for me

2) a New Years letter from my friend Nell from 2001

3) a free 2002/2003 daybook from my community college--never used it

4) a photocopied article on the psychology of Mary Poppins that my Mom thought I'd be interested in

5) and another article from my Mom on Celtic faeries

6) newspaper clipping on photography show of one of my bellydancer acquaintance's husband

7) ticket to a home and garden tour dating from June 2001

8) three pages of a French trip itinerary that I did not take--went with another tour

9) two glossy travel brochures from 2004

10) a form response to my enquiries about attaining a second (Irish) passport

11) a printed out copy of some of my flower photographs but the ink on my printer was running out so they are quite faded-looking

12) a 2003 brochure concerning my husband's old college courses

13) a twelve-page article on the Taliban that I printed off the Internet in 2001

14) a newspaper clipping from 2003 on tree-pruning methods

15) a copy of Albert Einstein's Riddle --if you can figure it out you are in the top 2% of intelligent people in the world: heh, guess I'm not!

16) the bill from a great meal with my friends in December 2002 at the Old House restaurant

17) a brochure from a paint store called A Celebration of Tuscany with paint colours like "Olive Branch" and "Late Wheat" and "Tuscany Green": I think I kept it because I'm a sucker for things with the word Tuscany on them

18) a brochure from the UBC Botanical Garden in Vancouver

19) some colourful postcard-like things from the National Film Board of Canada advertising their Women and Spirituality Trilogy

20) a handwritten sheet of Yu-Gi-Oh card prices from when I was selling them on Ebay about a year ago--I still remember selling that B. Skull Dragon Card: who pays $30 for these things!

21) a word-search/flyer from the Macaroni Grill restaurant in Victoria that our family went to in August 2004 to celebrate both Jen's birthdays

22) two photocopies of the article from Canadian Living magazine where Heather is interviewed about her volunteer time at the orphanage in Kathmandu, Nepal. I have an original copy of the article already so I don't need these also.

23) some vague jotted notes on how to insert pictures into a text article using Microsoft Word--nowadays the only time I add pictures to things is on Blogger

24) a flyer for an EarthMonkey Entertainment EQUINOX event on St. Patrick's Day of some unspecified year. I didn't go, so I think I must have saved it for the Brian Froud fairy artwork on it. Possibly some fire-dancers I know were performing there.

25) a map of Merville I printed out in 2004, probably so I could find my way to a Solstice celebration out in the boonies

26) some notes on Vancouver Island author Jack Hodgins, for an English literature course I did in 2003 to finish my Associate of Arts Degree--for some reason I have scribbled the quote " It takes a child to raze a village" at the bottom of the paper.

27) a thankyou card from this past summer from our neighbours Brig and Chris for our "willingness to help us with our shed--you were a great encouragement to us. You guys are great neighbours." They also brought us homemade muffins. Awwwwww! :)

28) a ChildHaven birthday card from "my other mother" :)

29) a business card from our real-estate agent Arlene from four years ago

And last, but not least...

30) The emailed results from my astronomy teacher Ron for the course I took in 2003:

Quizzes: 95.5%
Labs: 93.8%
Mid-Term: 87.8%
Final Exam: 86.4%
Total Course: 90.4%
Final Grade: A

I know why I kept this--I was very,very proud that I'd done so well on this course. I've always thought of myself as not very skilled in math, but this course proved I was a little brainier than I thought.

But now that I've shared my accomplishment with y'all, I think I'm okay letting this piece of paper go.

Spider Girl Starts a New Decluttering Blog

This is a sort of sister blog to my first blog, Spider in the Bathtub, which is daily reading for family and friends, in which I prattle on about any number of things as the fancy takes me.

But I'm not linking it, at least not yet, because I'm not sure that I want to share my junking out process with people who actually know me.

That's what I want to write about in this blog: letting go of all the clutter in my house and in my life. I may not be a text-book pack-rat but I've felt for a while that there is a lot of stuff that I'd like to let go of: paper, clothes, memorabilia, stuff that I'm not even sure why I've kept.And recently I've met some inspiring people and read some inspiring books that have made me decide to document the process. Why not?