End of year stats

As the year 2011 is drawing to a close, time for a little summary.
I have, per today, lost a total of 11.5 kilos in 2011 (that´s 25.3 pounds for the metrically challenged), going down two sizes in clothes and reentering the land of standard sizes.
For a period of about six months, my weight had been stalling, due to my being less careful about eating carbs. Only when I went back to eating the way that had helped me get rid of the first 13.6 kilos of condensable matter in 2010, did my weight move in a downward direction again.
So I know what my goal for 2012 will be- stick to my low-carb way of eating, and see how far that will take me towards my goal of no longer being overweight. It´s less than fifteen kilos to go, so, if I were to avoid hitting another big plateau, it would be entirely reachable within the next year.
What I did miss, sadly, was my goal of leaving obesity by the end of this year, but I am, even with the slight regain over the holidays, still less than three pounds away from that point, and I am confident that I will be able to reach it soon.

Happy new year to everyone!


Julia

Timely Xmas present

Wooo-hooo!
The running around for the final errands before the holidays seems to have paid off nicely- as per this morning I´m officially less than one pound away from being no longer obese!
Wishing everybody a similar surprise for the holidays, and "have a busy Santa", as they say hereabouts!

Julia

Loose ends of the year

That´s what I´m just tidying up at the office before I go off into my well-deserved Christmas staycation. I may be posting somewhat less frequently for the rest of the year because literally all of the Christmas preparations are on my back, so blogging will have to take a back seat, and I didn´t have any posts ready to schedule either. Right now, I feel like one of those Hindu deities with at least eight arms and one instrument in each hand, but I hope the number of my arms will be back to normal after some R+R .
Until then,

here´s wishing everybody a merry Christmas, Chanukkah, Kwanza, Winter Solstice, Festivus or whatever you celebrate, and a happy New Year!


Julia

Pesky plateau

It´s less than a week till Christmas and the extra-special meals that go along with it. I had hoped to break the barrier down from morbid obesity before that, but it doesn´t look like I´ll be able to make it any more, as my weight seems, once more, to be plateauing. Now this isn´t the first time that has happened, actually, I have encountered a plateau about every ten kilos down and at any weight I´d had for more than a couple of weeks. As I´ve gone down some ten kilos since this summer, hitting another of these should not come unexpectedly. From past experience I know it´s the time during which my body reorganizes itself around the lower weight, the time where the multiple chins and loose skin recondense and I find myself going down in clothes size in spite of my weight being stuck. But still- I had gotten so close! Less than three pounds from where I am, there´s the land of Just Overweight waiting, and me looking at it like a person on the wrong side of a river with no bridge. As it is, the high workload during the last weeks has been taking its toll on my dietary habits, resorting to pizza for dinner too often and having to dig into the pantry for pasta and rice because there was no time to grocery shop. So, I did go over my carbs, if not my calories, for several days in a row, and promptly regained two pounds. I´m not as vexed by that as I might be, because I know that filling the carbohydrate stores of the body back up will keep some water inside, too, to a tune of about two pounds, so, I know where the gain came from.
As I wrote before, the human body is a perfect accountability instrument.
Which is what I will have to keep in mind during the holidays, too. I am intending to stick to my guns as close as possible, which means leaving out all those starchy and sugary goodies, and hope I will be able to keep my weight and not regain. As I have taken some time off work beyond the holidays themselves, maybe, if the weather stays warm enough, I might even resume my morning walks that had stopped when the demands on my time at work became too big.
As I will be away from my scales for some time, too, being extra vigilant of my intake will be of the essence if I don´t want to have a rude awakening at the start of the new year.
Then again, I should not complain. I am, at present, twelve kilos down from what I weighed at the same time last year, and twenty-seven  from two years ago. At that going rate, I might even get close to being normal-weighted again by the end of next year. Provided I don´t fall off the wagon and stick to my caloric and carb limits, of course.
In the end, it´s perseverance that counts. I would never have believed that I could get my weight down to where I am now, given what more than twenty years of fighting my weight unsuccessfully had done to my metabolism, and the relatively slow speed at which I am going down again, compared to what some other big losers claim, is what I can do and keep up without stressing myself too much. Besides, what I also found is that my body would switch into starvation mode rapidly if I went too far below 1200 calories a day, so that, too, is a limit I have to respect.

Slow and easy does it. Sometimes, it even works small miracles.


Julia

No frost wardrobe

It´s getting colder hereabouts, and basically, it would be time to pull out the warm winter sweaters and jackets. Only this year, I have a little technical problem there. My warmest sweaters, those that only came out when it was really cold, were all from the time when I was at my top weight. Thus, they had become way too big, hanging down to my knees, so I donated them this spring so that somebody else might still get some use out of them. I thought, at the time, that it would be no problem getting new ones to fit me this winter.
Alas, I find myself in the wrong. I just made a beeline through the shops, only to find that this year´s fashion seems to be made for a somewhat warmer climate. Would you imagine I did not find a single warm sweater in my size? Same thing for jackets. I was looking for some cozy down jacket or something of that kind that I could wear whenever my usual long coat would be impractical, and all they had were jackets that were so flimsy and cheaply made that wearing them at temperatures below freezing would be a certain way to catch pneumonia.
I am, at present, quite angry at the fashion industry. If it weren´t for my vintage coat that still fits me, I would be out of winter wardrobe with no way to replace it. With me, that´s because I have condensed myself, but what, for example, about young girls who have outgrown their old jackets?  Every woman who doesn´t have an old coat to tide her over this year´s fashion is, by decree of the fashion industry, sentenced to one winter of shivering.
Hey there, fashion designers, just because winter is arriving late this year, that´s no guarantee it will stay that warm till spring!
Guess I´ll just have to take advantage of the fact that I still have a somewhat wider coat and a winter blazer in my former (bigger) size, and then put on layers to keep from freezing if it were to get cold. And hope that next year´s fashion will be more sensible.


Julia

Windy city

The first gusts and gales of the forecast storm are rattling the windows as I write this. The earflapped hat I bought yesterday has been doing me good service already on my way to work, and I intend to go home as soon as possible today, as the forecast by now is so bad that they are warning people not to go outside or drive if they can avoid it.
This weekend being the last before the holidays, I´ll have to get the menu planning and shopping done as far as possible. Once more, there´s ample reason to be grateful for my big freezer, because I have plenty of room to store and freeze the ingredients for Christmas dinner in advance. And, of course, there´s laundry to be done, and some paperwork, too. So, I don´t think I´ll be bored this weekend at all.
Which is as well because I´ll have to watch what I eat even more than usual if I want to get below that magic limit of morbid obesity before Christmas. I´ve been stuck for a couple of days now, and I just hope this isn´t another pesky plateau hitting just two pounds away from overweight. So, definitely no noshing on this weekend.
As we´re going to have MIL over for Christmas, I´ll not be able to do my usual routine over the holidays, which worries me a bit. After all, there´s that unavoidable family celebration in January, and I will be meeting some people who last saw me at almost my top weight, and whom I have barely spoken to any more since then, partly because of their hurtful reaction to me having become fat. I´m pretty nervous about meeting them as it is, and knowing  I were no longer obese would do wonders for my confidence when facing them.
It´s strange how those people who have absolutely no place any more in my day-to-day life still can get at my guts that way. If they were not related to me, there´d be no way I´d ever allow them to meet me again, whatever my weight. But the way things are, I´ll probably not be able to avoid it. I have even thought of praying for a blizzard or some other natural event that would allow me not to go there in January. But I don´t think I´ll get that lucky, so, I should better be prepared as well as possible before going there.
Until then, I try not to think of them at all.
After all, I´m not doing this for their sakes, but for my own.


Julia

Storm warning ahead

Looks like we´re going to expect one of the worst storms in the last years tomorrow. Luckily, the town I live in is situated at the bottom of a valley, so we might be spared from the worst, but still, this means that after two unseasonably warm months that felt more like spring than like autumn, winter is finally coming.
I´m glad that my car has been serviced recently, and I can be certain there´s enough antifreeze inside. We also have a parking lot in a closed garage, so, no danger of any shingles, branches or such hitting our car.
As for weatherproof apparel, I still have last winter´s coats which still serve me well and allow for layering sweaters and vests underneath.
Over lunch break, I went looking for a new winter hat, since the ones I already have are either not covering my ears or looking more than a bit silly. When I was fat, any hat would look silly over my then rather round face, but now that my face isn´t looking like the full moon with a double chin any more, I´d rather not wear these any more.
What I found was a hat shaped like a russian tchapka, with downturnable ear flaps, made from leather with a fake fur lining. The best thing about it was that, due to sales of winter garments having been poor because of the too-warm weather, the shops are already downmarking the winter stuff, so, I got it at a discount, too. At home, I´m going to treat the leather with leather spray, so this hat will also be waterproof. And I hope I´ll be able to wear it for some years to come.
We´ll see if the rest of winter is going to make up for the too-mild weather before. While I like a white Christmas as much as anyone else, I hope we- and all the other people visiting their families- won´t have to drive there through snow and ice.
Apart that, right now, at the office there´s a bad case of what they call December fever going round- everyone is feverishly pulling together loose ends in time for year-end statistics! Including myself, which means I have a bit less time for this blog than usually.
And I´ll have to get my Christmas shopping done this weekend, which means finishing the meal planning, too. Oh to be Robinson Crusoe...he had all his work done by Friday :).


Julia

Gifted necessities

One of the reasons why I hated having to make up a Christmas wish list every year as a child was that not only did my parents insist on me making up one, they were also fundamentally opposed to giving anything as a gift for Christmas that was even remotely useful or practical. To be fair, the things I needed, I got, but not for Christmas. As if wishing for a warm coat, or even some college textbooks, were an obscenity, while wishing for some utterly useless stuff  like another plush teddy wasn´t.
But, for many people besides my parents, Christmas gifts are not supposed to be sensible or practical, just pretty, or cute, or surprising. Picking out something that the recipient really needs and will use seems so- un-romantic by comparison.
What that means is that most of these pretty, cute and surprising things are clutter as soon as they enter the house.
Even worse is the "but there must be presents or it ain´t Christmas"-mindset that leads the giver to spend hard-earned money on -or even go into debt for- things that the recipient neither needs nor wants.
Economically, in that case you give away something of no value to the recipient and get back something of no value to you, meaning that you just sold the family finances short by the price of two pieces of clutter.

In my own family, I don´t ever want such things to happen.
The premise is simple: I do not ever want to give or receive a present just so that a present is given, which means that yes, Christmas with no presents at all would be perfectly fine with me.
On the other hand, to me, it is perfectly acceptable to pick out something you need and can use and chose that to be your Christmas wish.
So, for our grown-up Christmas, we will perhaps get some items we can use and put them benath the tree,or rather, in front of it  but we won´t take home any additional clutter.

Looking at those wish-inducing catalogues that make letterboxes overflow in December, what I have realized this year is that they are marketing a lot of things as "special Christmas sets" that are packaged to look most impressive under a tree (think ten colored-enamel matching pots of which, at most, four will see regular use, or that twenty-knife block for someone whose most-used cooking utensil is a can opener). Such things give the impression of being practical and useful, but they are also a form of clutter if the recipient doesn´t  need or use them. 
The positive thing about this is that by applying the rule of necessity to any offer in those catalogues, I have, once more, reminded myself that our household is, by now, so well-equipped that we really need, at this point in time, nothing new in the way of kitchen utensils or such, and very little in the way of anything else, and that, if I disengage the purchases from the holidays, I may even profit from some hefty after-holiday discounts on the things my family really needs. And that is better than having to wrap or unwrap them in time for Christmas.


Julia

Wants vs. needs

I just dropped off my car at the repair shop for the biannual checkup that is mandatory hereabouts. There are also some minor repairs that must be done before I get that sticker on the license plate, and the repair guy told me I´d get the car back tomorrow at the earliest because they will have to procure some replacement parts first- "we don´t keep all of the parts for the older models in stock any more".
What that tells you is that I don´t drive the most recent model. But, I have wheels. And they are paid for.

Which is more than a lot of people can claim.

It never ceases to amaze me when I see those big, latest-model, expensive new cars, and behind the steering wheel, there´s some waif of a twenty-year-old girl, or a male of the same age with heavy tattoos on his arms, dressed, invariably, in clothes with visible brand names on them, and holding the latest model smart phone. Now I know one shouldn´t judge a book by its cover, but most of those young people don´t look as if they were earning as much in a year as those cars cost. So, they are most likely paying through the nose for a car loan on an asset that has, just by being driven off the dealer´s lot, lost some ten to twenty percent of its monetary value on the day they bought it. Those same young people are patronising electronics stores, clothes stores, and they don´t hesitate for a moment to spend twenty bucks at a fast-food restaurant instead of cooking two or three home-cooked meals off the same amount. There´s a reason why someone dubbed the sixteen-to-forty-year olds the "advertising relevant target group".
In our consumerist society, a lot of people have forgotten- or worse, never learned- the difference between something you want and something you need. Even kindergarteners clamor for the most recent brand name dolls or clothes, and brand name logos on jeans or sneakers appear sometimes to be more important to the teenaged wearers than the garments themselves.
What these things create for the owners is an external semblance of wealth.
The story behind the scenes, most of the time, is a different one.
Consumer debt has been steadily on the rise for several decades, and the number of people who reach the point of having to file for bankruptcy before they reach the age of thirty along with it.
And then, when it´s too late, they are forced to learn and apply the difference between a want and a need.

Because most of those consumerist goodies are just wants.
Someone defined "needs" as "food, clothes, transportation, and shelter". While I agree with that definition in general, it doesn´t cut it when trying to determine what to cut out of a too-tight budget.

Food is a need. Eating out in a restaurant is a want.
Clothes are a need. Brand name tagged jeans are a want.
Transportation is a need. A brand-new Porsche is a want.
Shelter is a need. A five-bedroom-condo for two people is a want.
Being reachable by phone may be a need. The most recent I-Phone (TM)  is a want.

Come to think of it, most of the things we acquire are, strictly speaking, wants. If we could live without it, it is expendable.
Now if you can afford the price for a want, there´s nothing wrong with indulging. But by that I mean, can you pay for it in cash? Or do you have to put it on your credit card? Because then you really can´t afford it. You are instead betting on your future self to be able to afford it, whatever it is, plus cumulative interest, which can make those credit card purchases a lot more expensive than the price tag on the item.
That alone should be reason enough to revive that strange ancient tradition of saving up to buy something, because that will keep your future self from cussing you for being fool enough to pick up such a load of debt. Besides, you might even find you don´t want the item any more after a while. Guess what, it´s cheaper to find out the interest in a thing was short-lived before you have dragged it home to clutter up your habitation and mess up your credit card balance.

And the needs? If you remove the wants from the budget, you might just find you have enough to get on by. At the very least, you´ll have a bit more breathing space.

And always remember that the very best things in life mostly come without a price tag.



Julia

It pays to watch

For many years, the ups and downs of my weight were, to me, looking like the results of throwing dice- random and frustrating. Many were the days when I would have sworn by all the deities that I hadn´t overeaten, only to find my weight up by several pounds the next day. Less often, I thought I´d goofed, but weight numbers didn´t tell at all.
What that gave me was a feeling of having totally no control over my body. How else to explain weight gains that did not compute with what I´d eaten? As in overeating by one thousand calories, say, and gaining two pounds which would mean seven thousand calories if it were fat?
For a long time, the sheer helplessness of facing what looked like a totally randomized response pattern stopped me from even trying to recondense my excess baggage. I suffered from the effects of dragging around those 100 extra pounds, but I had no idea how to get rid of them. The only thing I knew was that the diets I had tried out until then had not helped. Quite the opposite. They only made me feel worse because, heck, one was supposed to lose weight when sticking to them, and I sometimes even gained.
The fallacy I´d fallen victim to, of course, was that a calorie is a calorie no matter where it comes from. Only when I started tracking how much of the macronutritients I ate did I see that there was indeed a predictable pattern to my gains and losses, one that depended on the ratio of carbohydrate calories to protein and fat calories. In other words, my weight  follows my carbohydrate intake. Many carbs, even if I stay under my daily calories, mean the scale goes up on the next day, and few carbs mean a maintain or a loss.
I´m not going on a soapbox here, but cutting down carbs is what worked for me. It also worked for DH, who has, just by eating the same things I eat, gotten down two pants sizes since May. So, in our totally non-randomized two-subjects study, we have found that keeping our carbohydrate intake below 30 percent on most days has enabled us to condense weight that, with more carbohydrate-loaden diets, no amount of caloric restriction short of starving ourselves would have moved.
This weekend, I put the counter-check to this into practice. We did, for the third Sunday in Advent, have some mulled wine, some lebkuchen with a cup of hot cinnamon chocolate, and dinner was a big portion of spinach-and-feta lasagna. In the end, I had about twice the carbs I eat ordinarily. And this morning, I predictably found myself up two pounds (not what the lasagna weighed).
While any gain is not exactly a reason for joy when you´re as close to an intermediary goal as I am right now (I absolutely want to be below the limit of morbid obesity before Christmas), I know this time that the nominal gain of two pounds is less than three ounces of fat, maximum,  and the rest is water retention from eating those carbs, plus what I still have inside me of the food I ate yesterday. So, today, I´ll cut waaay down on the carbs, drink a lot of water, and go back on plan in general. And that will be a lot easier now that I don´t have to feel I´m missing out on all the season´s goodies this year.
Besides, when looking at where those carbs came from, I could even see that the lasagna accounted for half of them, so if I had had either lasagna or lebkuchen and hot chocolate, not both, I´d even have stayed on plan. As I said before, I may eat every food, just not everything at once, and in moderation. After all, this has to be for life, because if I went back to what I always did I´d be back having what I always had real fast.


Julia

Unsaddling sight

Right now I´m wrapping up a week of sheer pandemonium (again) at the office, which is also the reason why I didn´t post lately. Just why everyone is wildly determined to get all things that only have been procrastinated about brought in order at a time when there is enough on everybody´s plate with things that absolutely need doing by December 24 or 31, is amazing me every year. Oh well.
One thing that did go according to plan, this week, was my weight. As per today, I´m less than one kilogram away from the point where I´ll no longer be morbidly obese. just overweight..
Once more, my body seems to be rearranging itself. I had to use the handicapped restroom (there was just that one) at a public building yesterday, which had a mirror fixed so that a person in a wheelchair would bee able to see themselves. To me, that mirror was reflecting back the upper part of my legs, which I had always avoided looking at because of the pronounced saddlebags I had. As we have only one full-legth mirror in the house, I hadn´t looked at them for awhile, even avoiding to look that way last Saturday in the dressing room.
So, when I suddenly saw them reflected back at me, I did a double take because...the saddlebags are almost gone! My legs still can bear to part with some condensable matter, of course, but there is, suddenly, a smooth line from my hips down to my knees, even without the help of spanx (TM) or such.
And I am wearing my brand new size XL pants. One thing that´s especially good about getting down to that size is that my old pants from the plus size store were more than twice as expensive as the new ones, so, keeping up with the decreasing sizes has just gotten a lot less pricey than it used to be, apart being less of a hassle because I can, now, shop at any normal-sized clothes store.
Not that I intend to go overboard with clothes shopping. This year´s wide-over-tight look is great for wearing last year´s size sweaters and jackets over my new pants, apart from the fact that they have only a few items at all in the jewel tones I like in sweaters. No way I´m going to turn myself into a grey mouse now that I finally am getting into the shape to wear form-fitting clothes again. So, I´ll wear what I have, and save myself buying  the transition sizes that hopefully would also be too big next year.
This weekend, I´ll go for another wardrobe raid- evicting the baggy trousers! I´ll box them up for the time being, but I most fervently hope they´ll follow the lead of my 5XL- jackets which, from that same clothes box, did, after some time, go directly to Goodwill.
If there´s one thing I have learned on my way down so far, it´s that I must not ever stop being watchful. Journalling every bite, and weighing in daily. Gaining it all back would be as easy as reverting to my old eating habits, that´s what I must never forget. And keeping it off is as easy as sticking with the things I learned about portion control and what not to eat that helped me get to where I´m now.
As a matter of fact, I have found out that it has become easier for me to resist the usual sugary and chocolate-y treats of the season. And whenever I start to think of eating some, I remind myself that the "goodie" in question will never make me feel as good as wearing those size XL pants, and then I´m not ready to pay the price of indulging my sweet tooth any more. I may have to have a Christmas without stollen or lebkuchen, but I will be having it in size XL pants, for the first time in this millenium.



Julia

Off the lists

For many years, I have more or less faithfully kept a running list of what I saw on the scale. I expanded that by adding the data from some even older weighing lists, and I do, by now, have a rather complete set of data back to May 2002, plus several fragments from 1992, 1990 and earlier, back to high school and the time before my weight struggle started in earnest.
What these lists tell is a classic story of how yo-yo dieting plus plenty of diverse stressors in my life plus my several bouts with binge eating disorder turned a small weight problem (medically, actually a non-existent one) into morbid obesity stage three.
What they also show is the times I quit journalling my weight, and the fact that these, of all times, should have been where I should not have closed my eyes to what was happening. Every gap in those lists corresponds to one of the major gains that ended up putting me at 110 pounds above my starting weight.
It wasn´t as if I hadn´t tried to reverse what was happening. Several times, I managed to get rid of some ten or fifteen kilos (20 to 30 pounds), only to regain them faster than they had come off, and then some.
I sometimes regret not having the complete data for all those years. There might have been some interesting things to be found out by analyzing that.
But what I can do is look at those lists and find out how long ago it was that my body weighed what it weighs today.
Er, that must be "what I could do". As per this morning´s weigh-in I have officially entered the uncharted areas, meaning that I do not have the data to tell when I last weighed what I weigh today. The only thing I can tell is that it must have been sometime around the beginning of 2002, which means that I am, right now, enjoying the body feeling I had for the last time a full decade ago . The next recorded data, apart one single glaring number from when I first went up to the 220s in 1992, will be from the eighties of the last century, from the time when I first went from normal to overweight. So, if ever I get there I´ll know that I haven´t been there since the days of shoulder pads and teased hairdos.
I have been morbidly obese for almost ten uninterrupted years.With every pound I lose, and with every ability that comes back, as in walking without crutches or putting on my own stockings, I realize how much these years have cost me in terms of quality of life, and I appreciate those abilities perhaps a lot more than someone who never lost them. I might have stayed inside that fat prison for life, missing out on many things that give joy, and suffering from ever more limitations.
I´m grateful that I have come out of it thus far, and I know that I will have to stay vigilant for the rest of my life to avoid sliding back.
And now, I am going for the limit of morbid obesity. It´s less than three pounds away!


Julia

Fancy pants

For a long time, purchasing trousers was one of the things I passionately hated to do.
Going into a shop, finding the rack that held the biggest size pants they sold, picking a pair and going into the dressing room. Avoiding the sight of my legs and b*tt in the mirror, stepping into those pants only to find they were impossible to pull up any higher than my knees. Stepping out of them again, putting the pants I arrived in back on, leave shop for another that might have a bigger size to offer. Rinse, wash, repeat.
When I discovered a line of plus size pants that would fit me, I quit trying on any others, just buying the same pair of pants over and over again, in ever-growing sizes. On the way down with my weight, still those same pants, this time in decreasing sizes. And the knowledge that, with successfully condensing myself, the day was near when the smallest size of those plus-sized pants would cease to fit me, and then what next?
As I am approaching the point of no longer being obese, the dreaded moment has arrived. Thus, on Saturday, I found myself standing in the middle of a dozen pants racks in a shop that stocks every garment in normal through plus sizes, wondering just which ones to try on first so as to not end up frustrated at the first try.
I actually didn´t have the slightest idea what size I need now, so, the way into the dressing room couldn´t be avoided this time. So, gingerly, I grabbed several pairs of size XL jeans and tried them on and...


...they fit! All of them, actually. I was able to pull them up, button them, and close the zippers.
Hey, I haven´t worn that size since the last millenium! I know, it´s still "X"L, but when you have had 3XL or 4XL in a brand that is also vanity sizing its products (meaning you have to add at least another "X" to realistically compare them to regularly sized brands), being rid of the numbers before the "X" is enough to make you dizzy.
So, I ended up taking home three pairs of form-fitting trousers, which ought to take me through another couple of pounds´ loss.
What I couldn´t resist, of course, was pulling out the same style trousers in my old size and look at them. Just seeing how big the seat of those looked made me cringe. That had been me. That was where those sixty-plus pounds had been. Holding up the ones that fit me now, I still have trouble adjusting to the fact that I really, actually can fit my body into these, but boy, it feels good to see them.
And wear them, of course, without those droopy bottoms, and with the knowledge that I am back to a size I have last worn before becoming obese.
This feels good.


Julia
 

Wreaths and decorations

When setting up my Advent decorations, I had been somewhat vexed by the fact that I could not find the little decorated wreaths which go over the bottom ends of candles to make them look more festive. I knew for sure that I had had one for every candle holder I put out, and I was fairly certain that I had not decluttered them, either. But they weren´t to be found in my living room cupboards, so I had already guessed I´d tossed them.
Yesterday, when taking the trash down to the cellar, I decided to look for them in the china boxes. Inside a waterproof chest, I discovered, not only the wreaths, but also a whole bunch of artificial flower decorations I hadn´t even remembered I owned.
Now, me and Christmas decorations has always been a mixed story. Christmas at home was always a bit of the "be merry, dammit" variety, my father being about the only one who insisted on there being a perfect feast, which absolutely had to include a real tree, oodles of decorations, and a multi-course dinner that kept my mother and me nailed to the kitchen most of the day, while my Grandparents and myself could have well done without all that ado.
As such things go, the likelihood of anything going wrong rises exponentially when you try to make things perfect, so, there ensued invariably some culinary or other drama which led to tears, door-slamming, and everyone feeling, not festive, but altogether lousy. The whole affair was so upsetting for me as a child, that, like clockwork, right when that gorgeous dinner was about to be served, I came down with stomach cramps so bad that I had to retreat to my room and couldn´t even eat any of the food served.
So, as soon as I could, I decided not to go there for Christmas any more. Which led to another round of drama, because visiting for Christmas was one of those "done" things my parents insist on.
For several years, I avoided Christmas by volunteering for emergency duty at the office over the holidays, that being a reason they had to accept why I couldn´t come.
I was, in those years, glad that I did not have to celebrate Christmasat all any more. One of my more memorable Christmas eves was spent at the office, listening to Gregorian chant on my computer, catching up with work, and enjoying the quiet outside. That was, actually, the first Christmas I experienced where there wasn´t any crying or door-slamming.
How my -otherwise rather intelligent- parents managed to turn the holidays into such a turn-off while claiming all the while that they should be beautiful, still escapes me.
For a while, I had become a veritable grinch. Anything to do with Christmas was, for me, taboo. That did lead to some tensions with DH, who did not have the same kind of Christmas memories I had, and would have liked to have our flat decorated for Christmas, while I flat out refused to have anything of the kind in view.
All through that time, my relatives kept sending me those decorations. Most of them, actually, came from my beloved Aunt, so, I didn´t outright throw them away, but I wasn´t ready to put them up yet. Just to humor DH, I still exchanged decorations for summer and winter, but I kept them relatively neutral, trying to avoid that christmas-y look.
Which is why all of those pretty silk flowers and wreaths were, years ago, unceremoniously dumped into that box and went down to the cellar, waiting for me to change my mind about Christmas.
When I found them again yesterday, I picked out the most beautiful ones and took them up to our flat, and spent the rest of the evening distributing wreaths to candlesticks and poinsettia bouquets to vases, all the while watched by DH who must have wondered who that woman was and what she had done with his wife.
Guess what, the flat looks good. Festive, joyful. And we are going to celebrate Christmas together, not perfectly, but perfectly our way. There won´t be any slammed doors, and there won´t be more than three courses to the Christmas dinner, but I will be able to try all of them. There won´t be mountains of unwanted presents, but the joy of being together. And that is, after all, what Christmas should really be about, isn´t it?


Julia

Rounding up the strays

One of the things I find when decluttering is that some categories of things have been distributed all through the flat. Take stationery- I had writing utensils and paper stashed away in four different locations, which led to several unnecessary double purchases because I couldn´t find the ballpoint pens or envelopes or whatever when I needed them, so I just went and bought another pack.
Only now have I managed to put all of my stationery in one place, and I think I won´t have to buy any for quite a while.
Another culprit, it turned out, was candles. After yesterday´s candle closet cleanup, I had that nagging feeling of having missed something. As indeed I had. Hidden away in the corridor cupboard was one decorative (read: too-pretty-to-burn) Easter candle, plus a plastic bag full of even more votive candles. Putting them into the candle closet made, for one, sure that I will have that Easter candle out next year instead of letting it languish in that closet, and the votives (which I had plain forgotten about) have a chance of getting lit, too.
And the corridor closet now holds only the two handmade pottery table sets I own which, by now, only come out for special occasions, plus some thermos coffee pots of DH´s, and two extra packs of paper napkins courtesy of IKEA. As for the latter, a napkin roundup is already planned. As far as I remember there are three places where I have some of those.I´ll see how much space I need for them.

Not having a designated space for things is obviously another big cause of clutter. Some of those hidden stashes came about when I had to do a quick tidying up, and did not have a designated place to put things. To get them out of the way, I just put them into the closest available space, which made the outward room look tidy and turned the inside of the closets into a mess.
If I want to avoid a repetition of that situation, every thing I own must have a place to keep it in.
Things for which I have no place where they can live are automatically clutter. So are things stashed away in unlikely places, because it´s not likely their existence will be remembered when such an item is needed.
Just the act of keeping track of things distributed all over the place creates stress.
Reducing the amount of items to keep track of, aka decluttering, plus finding permanent homes for the items I keep, reduces my general stress level considerably.
Rounding up the strays from different categories has allowed me to become conscious of things I tend to overbuy, and even get rid of some unnecessary extras, thus creating even more space to give a permanent home to the things I keep.
And then all I have to do is lead the strays back to their homes whenever I find them out of their places, and enjoy my uncluttered flat.


Julia

Candle mess

For several days now, I have done small decluttering projects in the evening. Yesterday, it was time to go at those candle boxes and cupboards. What I found in there was the result of keeping candles in a room that has no air condition for several hot summers (which also tells a lot about how long I haven´t been looking into those cupboards). Several of the candles had actually melted together into one unrecognizable block of wax, others were bent into a c-shape, and some more were so badly dented on the surface that no polishing could restore them to a semblance of presentability.
What was left after tossing these were all in all three unopened packages of vanilla scented votive candles, so I know better than to get another of these before having used up those I already have, plus six large-diameter candles.
And five heavy iron candle holders intended for those altar-style large candles. The thing being that I use, these days, a brass candle holder for the big candles, so these haven´t been used in a long while. As DH was against tossing them altogether, they will go to the cellar to join the extra china.
Two also unopened boxes of IKEA chandelier candles are bearing witness to the dangers of their decorations department. Being yellow and blue, I´ll use them up in the spring. And the half-burned chandelier candles I also found will be used up this season. These are actually left over from table decorations, as I like to have a fresh candle to light for every celebration. In the future, we are going to have candlelight for dinner more often, and I´ll try to always use up a candle once I put it in the holder.
At the end of  the evening, I had created enough space in my cupboard to store the leftover candles so that they will, hopefully, not melt or bend before I can use them up.
And I found myself at a goal line of sorts. The things inside my cupboards now are things I do, at this point in time, not want to throw out.
So, when I get around to using up those candles, the space I have then is what I must work with,  unless I take another swipe at the pocket book and video department.
Which perhaps I should do. There are still too many books that entered my household whenever there was a book sale in the vicinity, and which were sometimes not even read. The worst marketing trap for me used to be the sales where you got a hefty discount if you bought a certain number of books. I always came home from these with several carrier bags full of books. Most of the time, when looking inside, they turned out to have been marked down for a good reason- uninteresting, boring, or plain literary junk.
Now if I want to decide whether to buy a book at full price, I go to the closest bookstore and take a look inside. Most of the time, that´s enough to see that the cover is the most interesting thing about that book, and it stays where it is. At book sales, I did not take that time.
A lot of the results have been decluttered already. But I´m certain there are still enough to get rid of.
Besides, I have found myself reading a lot less since DH moved in with me. You see, we actually talk to each other, so there´s no need to anaesthesize myself with books in order to not feel the loneliness any more.
Thus, I am free to keep just the best ones, and let go of the rest.
I know which cupboard I´ll be digging in tonight...


Julia

Fairly different eyes

For several days, the way home from work has been leading me through the booths of the local Christmas fair. Smells of food, mulled wine and incense cones wafting across the streets, and the glitter of Christmas decorations, plus plenty of christmas-y decorations for sale.
Before I started condensing myself and my possessions, it would have been an occasion to shop for candles, figurines, and other tchotchkes, and for stuffing my face with fat-dripping deep-fried donuts and sugary stuff.
After over a year of becoming more mindful, I find myself not even wanting to go at all those goodies any more.
Knowing that I have plenty of decorations at home, and remembering how many I did already declutter because they simply weren´t used any more, helps, of course.
So does the realization that most of the things sold at fairs are coming at decidedly un-fair prices.
If, for example, I wanted to eat a baguette with garlic butter on top, at the fair, that would set me back by about four bucks, and I would have to eat it standing up, in the cold. The same kind of baguette bought frozen from the grocery store and prepared and eaten sitting down  in the warmth of my home would cost me one buck, ok, plus electricity for the oven, but I could, at least, be certain everything is hygienic.
The prices for decorations, too, are sky-high when buying them at those pretty-looking booths. So, if I should want another polystone reindeer, I could get one at any chain store for half of what I´d pay at the fair, too.
And candles? I have, at home, an extensive collection of brass candle holders, and also several boxes full of candles I bought and didn´t use up in the past years. So, this year, I am determined to use up the candles I already have before shelling out my hard-earned moolah for yet another one. Doing so saves me money and also space, because once the candles will be gone, I do not intend to hoard as many again, especially not those big, tall ones that take ages to burn down, so, even if I burn a candle every night until Christmas, I will not even be able to use them up. I still have several partly burned down ones that are on the list of things to go, and by actually lighting them I´ll get more joy out of them than by having them take up a whole cupboard.
Provided, that is, that I won´t overstock on them again, but right now, seeing how long I have had them, that´s not likely.
In the meantime, I am enjoying the new-found spaces in my living room, and the realization that not keeping too many things in stock allows me to liberate space that can be used better.
Not indulging in those small things will allow me to go at bigger remodeling projects. After all, if I added up what I have already decluttered in terms of excess decorations, the money I spent on those would probably buy a new couch or flatscreen TV had I but kept it.
So, this year, I´ll keep my purse shut when walking through the fair, and my mind on those things that somehow keep getting postponed because the money that could have been used for them was frittered away on clutter.
Perhaps I´ll even set up a piggy bank. Not pigging out on deep-fried anythings any more and putting the savings to feeding it instead might fill it up rather fast. And then I can go at my next habitation improvement projects.


Julia

It takes just two- or one

As we were spending the weekend at home (no black Friday or first-of-advent shopping madness for us), I had plenty of time to continue with the living room.
Guess what- the red cushions are still there, and they will probably stay, too. How that?
I mentioned that I had taken one of my red-cushioned easy chairs out of our living room. I had, at first, intended that to be just a test, to see what the effect would be. So, I was looking for a way to store it where the cushions wouldn´t get spoiled by moisture or such (we have a rather humid basement). And I had a sudden inspiration after DH told me he´d be sorry to see the red cushions go, because they look so friendly. I put that surplus cushion into Grandpa´s chair. It fits exactly, makes the sitting even more comfortable, and it brings that chair together with the others, optically. And I could put away the blanket I used to throw over the black chair, too. DH´s couch seat is now covered with a blanket in the same red, plus several throw pillows of the same color. What I put away were several blankets and pillows in yellow, blue and orange, which were actually left over from previous decorating schemes. The now cushionless chair frame I took apart ( thumbs up to collapsible IKEA furniture) and put it into the cellar. 
The end result was a seating space that is pulled together by the same color being used on every chair and couch in it, and with enough room to move in. It looks a lot more airy, too, even though there´s just one piece of furniture less.
On the other side of the living room, besides my computer desk, there was the perennial hotspot in the shape of a side table that once was intended to serve as an extension to my desk, but which ended up being buried in paper clutter that hadn´t made it into my filing cabinet. Besides, it made the space next to the desk look and feel crowded. So, I put away everything that was on that table, and then discovered that it could easily be slipped under my kitchen table where it´s out of the way, but still accessible if I should need it (I sometimes put my sewing machine on there, too).
Again, that area looked a lot more spacious than before.
Just by removing two pieces of furniture and some cushions and blankets, I turned a room that felt stuffed and suffocating back into one that looks open and inviting.  What surprises me, actually, is how few things I had to remove for that effect.
And, as the red blanket and pillows were already there, the whole remodel was practically free. Maybe I´ll pick up two or three more red pillowcases to replace the yellow ones, but that´s all.
Next stop, pictures. I have, for several years, been collecting the title pages of a wall calendar that has images of medieval book art, and each year´s title page is elaborately printed including the metallic effects that make old illuminated manuscripts so stunning. I also had bought several frames and matching frame mats  for them, but somehow had gotten around to framing only three while the rest of frames and what was intended to go in there was languishing on top of our living room shelf. Yesterday, I finally went at framing the last ones and hanging them. The wall they hang on is now looking complete, and the stack of stuff on top our shelves is gone, leaving me wondering why the dickens I kept procrastinating about a job that took, all in all, less than an hour to do.
That out of the way, I did take out my minimalist Advent decorations and, after placing them, settled down with a good book, a lit candle, and a nice hot cup of tea.
Advent time just as I like it.



Julia

Sweet tooth

The cold evenings we´ve had last week made me wish for a big cup of tea every evening when I came home. Usually, I drink herbal teas only, but, as DH wanted a cup, too, I took some Assam or Darjeeling black tea instead. Which I like, but only with milk in it. Before recondensing myself, also with a lump of brown sugar. As I am trying to avoid sugar now, I took some artificial sweetener instead.
And found myself climbing the walls with craving chocolate and cookies yesterday. I managed not to let that slip into a real binge, but boy, was it hard.
The thing about this is that I had never had such cravings during my weight loss journey before. Not even if I had eaten something with real sugar in it. I´ve still eaten chocolate or cookies, but never had a problem stopping after one or two.
It seems that it was the sweetener (which I don´t ordinarily use) that triggered the cravings. So this is one more thing I should better steer clear of if I want to get to goal.


Julia

Optical duh!

So, I did remove one of the two easy chairs in my living room. The second one with a matching stool is still there, as it turned out it was mostly the other one that kept getting in the way.
Space-wise, thus, the situation has been getting better. But optically, it still isn´t quite right.
You see, that easy chair has bright red cushions. DH´s couch is dark brown leather, and Grandpa´s easy chair is black. The cocktail chairs have dark green leather seats and backs.  When I bought the red cushions, I thought they´d brighten up the room a bit. But now, with a more minimalist decorator´s eye, they clash with about everything else in the room, apart from having gotten a bit dingy.
As I was intending to replace the cushions anyway, I went to the IKEA website to look for new ones, and found out that they have these now in dark brown leather, matching DH´s couch exactly.
I had thought of buying white leather cushions before, but that was when the only alternative color they had in leather cushions for those chairs was black. As I don´t really like black as a color for furniture, that precluded getting another color than white, even though I knew these would be staining easily.
Seeing they have them in dark brown now, I know what I´ll put on my wish list. Having the same color upholstery for couch and easy chair will make the whole room look more styled-through and put-together.
Besides, while I really like red as a color in general, those red cushions are so dominating the room that I have to keep everything matching them color-wise, or rather, that the other chairs keep clashing with them optically.
Dark brown, dark green and black are close enough together to match, but these red cushions will have to go. Just imagining the brown ones on that chair means thinking of a room that has more optical calm than it has today.
The other problem with our living room furniture is that there are also several different kinds of wood. My furniture was mostly pine and birchwood, so, light-colored kinds of wood, while DH, being a guy, brought darker-colored kinds, like teak or walnut.  Having  these in the same room means even more optical noise than just the upholstery would create.
Now if I could do as I wish I´d toss all of the dark stuff and replace it with birchwood or maple shelving and matching chairs and tables. Unfortunately, DH is very attached to the walnut and teak stuff because it came from his parent´s house as a gift to him. But maybe we´ll be able to put most or even all of it into what is now our old bedroom, which will become his office and den as soon as we can exchange rooms.
It´s amazing how decluttering has made me aware of the visual clutter that our furniture is creating. While there was plenty of stuff lying around on those chairs and tables, I blamed it just on that if the place looked cluttered. Now that most things have either gone or  found their permanent homes out of sight inside some cupboard, I suddenly see that the furniture mix in our living room looks cluttered enough on its own to keep the room from getting that feeling of calm that is what I wish for in interior decor. And I have discovered that it isn´t adding something new that will bring that feeling. Rather, it is removing things.
So, this weekend I´ll be once more going through our stuff, deciding what to get rid of, and enjoying the fact that we are getting ever closer to the goal of having a peaceful and calm flat.



Julia

What I´m grateful for

Even though Thanksgiving day isn´t officially celebrated hereabouts, just reading all the articles on other blogs where people list up what they are grateful for is enough to start me off with my very own (non-complete) list.

Right now,I´m grateful for
-the beautiful weather we´re having even though it´s late November
-the nifty spill-proof  to-go cup I have on my desk for water or tea
-the fact that I can walk the stairs to my flat again without having to pause
-my fridge full of nutritious foods
-every bit of space in my flat that I have already liberated by decluttering
-a wardrobe that has only clothes that fit me now
-the back-friendly office chair I sit on
-my coworkers who are a great team to work with
-the knowledge that I already possess everything I really need
-every pound I don´t have to drag around any more
-my rings that fit me again

-and most of all, for the wonderful man I´m going to meet with tonight, and the knowledge that he is my husband, and we are sticking together no matter what life brings, and for every minute we may spend together!



Julia

Counting down...

With just four and a half weeks left before christmas, countdowns are starting for holiday preparation as well as for the usual end-of-year frenzy at the workplace.
This year, I´m determined to pre-plan holiday meals so I can do the bulk of the shopping in advance. Maybe, if I stock up my freezer in time, I can avoid the annual price rush that comes right before the holidays.
It feels a bit strange that this will be the second christmas where I´ll apply portion control before preparing the meals.
In former years, at  christmas,  food was always the main event. So, the best cuts of meat and fowl were bought, and every meal went with at least two side dishes plus a sumptuous dessert. Everything was served in amounts big enough to allow everybody at least two servings of everything. At the end of meals, there were still plenty of leftovers, and everyone was stuffed to the point where belts become torture instruments.
The whole thing was costly, of course,  including the bags full of vegetables that we dragged home only to find that many of them didn´t even make it to the end of the holidays in spite of being kept in a cool place.
In the end, we regularly ended up overeating because we didn´t want any of those extra-special goodies to spoil.
The error in all this, of course, was that drive to overabundance I had. As if a meal weren´t as tasty if there was just enough of it for everyone to eat to the point of comfortable satiety, as if the very fact that there was twice as much food on the table as we needed was necessary for a meal to be a "real" holiday meal.
So, every year, I ended up with a too-big drain on the wallet and a too-big gain on the waist.
And I started to dread the holidays.
Now, there are some other reasons why I don´t like christmas, at least as it is commonly celebrated. But the food situation didn´t make things any better.
This time, I´ll apply the things I have learned during the course of the year to holiday cooking, too. Things like portion size control, meal planning, and most importantly, the knowledge that nobody has to overfeed in order to celebrate a proper holiday.
The best thing I can do to make sure of that is starting to plan early.
Especially as I am now so close to the point where I´ll no longer be obese. Less than five pounds away per this morning.
I intend to give myself a very special christmas present this year: a body that is no longer clinically obese, just overweight. And if I managed to get there before the holidays, I still want to be there after the holidays.

As I write this, Americans are probably already preparing their Thanksgiving turkeys.
Just as a reminder- if there are leftovers, most can even be re-frozen in single-meal portions, so, if you have a freezer that was big enough to hold the whole bird before cooking it, there´s certainly enough room for leftovers. From the point of food safety, deciding at once how much of the leftovers you´ll be able to eat before they go bad when they are just refrigerated and not refrozen, and then re-freezing the excess at once is best. Besides, it helps to get back on track immediately after the holiday meal.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!


Julia

Occupied space

We are not, it seems, going to move to another appartment anytime soon. That´s ok with me, after all, the one we´re living in right now has a nice layout, and the best (and biggest) kitchen I ever had.
But it also means that we will have to find the right balance between furniture and empty space.
Just removing a single chest of drawers from our bedroom has changed the way that room feels, opening up space and making things look altogether more spacious. And that wasn´t even a big chest.

Our living room is another room that could do with a bit more space. The culprits, in that case, are the easy chairs.
Before DH moved in, I owned two matching IKEA easy chairs and a double-seater couch, which left plenty of free space in the living room. With DH, there arrived a big three-seater, which replaced my double-seater, plus a small desk, the chair to it, and a fifties-style cocktail table with three matching chairs.
Now, I also got to inherit my grandpa´s recliner (much bigger than the other ones), and then there was the vintage danish design teak armchair that MIL gave us.
What it amounts to is that we have a living room that could seat ten people at once. The only hitch being that there´s just the two of us to use them. Granted, DH likes to put up his feet on the couch, thus occupying three places, but that still leaves six unused seats. No wonder the place feels crowded.

The likely candidates for eviction are my two easy chairs, because I would not have to have a discussion with DH before I could toss them. Except these are the only ones, apart the one my grandpa had, that I would keep. Then again, they have some stains on the upholstery that I haven´t been able to get out, and the replacement cushions I´ve been ogling would set us back by a coupla hundred bucks, for a pair of easy chairs that we are, right now, using for dropping blankets or newspapers on. The frames, btw., are no more expensive than the replacement cushions.
Perhaps I should try and put the frames of the IKEA chairs into the cellar for a try. The cushions I could store on top of my wardrobe, just for as long as it takes to decide whether these chairs should come back at all. It might even be that we like the more spacious feeling so much that we won´t miss them at all. In that case, we could pass them on to someone else who might be able to use them, and if ever we had a house where there´d be room for those, we could buy another set. If, that is, by then we wouldn´t prefer something more, er, stylish.

I´ll go for putting them out of the way tonight, and I´m curious how that will change the feeling of the room.

to be continued....


Julia

Files and drawers

When it´s cold outside, staying inside turns into the preferred modus of spending one´s time. Weekends, in late autumn, turn into golden opportunuties to boldly go where no declutterer has gone before.
This weekend, I took advantage of such an opportunity to go for another of the chests of drawers in our bedroom, managing to empty it out completely. Its former contents, at least those that did survive the purge, have migrated to the other three chests, and the empty chest is right now standing in the corridor, awaiting the final decision on it´s fate (toss, put into cellar, donate, give away?). Careful re-measuring of the available space in our future bedroom did, by the way, convince me thet there will be space enough for one such chest of drawers, or two stacked one on top of the other, besides the bed when we exchange rooms, so, the problem has just become somewhat smaller than I thought.
And then I went at the testimony to my own laziness.
I own a file cabinet with hanging files that hold the most important documents. Unfortunately, it also has a drawer on top that regularly becomes the repository for bills, bank statements, and such, that get tossed in there rather than filing them away at once. Every now and again, that drawer is full, and I´m forced to start filing. Which I did, sorting out what didn´t need to be kept, which meant a full bag of paper to go to the shredder.
Next stop, the other multi-drawered cabinet I have at my workplace at home, which held plenty of small electronics parts that I sorted through. Among them a graphics tablet I just "had to have" when it came out, and which rested unused in a box that named the systems requirements as "Windows 2000". It´s neither likely I´ll use that thing, nor will it fit in with my existing (somewhat more recent ;)) hard-and software. So, out with it. Out, too, with half the USB cables in there- I have more of them in use with my computers, so, any that could still lie in a drawer are probably superfluous. Also went- several outdated address and phone book CDs, CDs with drivers to some appliances I no longer own, and parts of said appliances. If any cable still is inside a sealed plastic baggie two years after I bought the appliance it is supposed to go with, I probably don´t need that cable. An old cell phone and charger, complete with a headset that doesn´t match my existing phone, went, too.
In the stationery department, I ditched about a hundrerd dried-out felt-tip pens plus the metal box they´d been in.
And found myself wondering how on earth I come by four packages of unused artist´s crayons. As these don´t dry out, I kept them, together with the box of watercolors. I haven´t given up hope yet that I just might have time to use them someday.  The single drawer they occupy is something I gladly spend for that hope. Even if the number of times I felt the impulse to create can, as per now, be counted by the times I bought materials, instead of by the number of things I actually painted:(.
Surprising doubles, next take: two six- hole-punches that go with my old filofax calendar- if ever I´ll use that again, one punch is enough, so out goes number two.
The end result of a whole day´s work is a workplace where I can finally find things again, and I have made room for the things that, due to overflowing cabinets, were left on the desk, so, the place is tidier on the outside, too.
Any lessons from this decluttering session?
Number one, if I print out something because it is relevant at the time, I should check it for further relevance before burying it in a drawer. Among the paper stuff I tossed were several centimeter´s worth of printouts made when I was shopping for my freezer online. The freezer has been bought two years ago, and one of the retailers half of whose freezer sortiment I printed out has even gone out of business by now.
Number two, ther seems to be no area where I wouldn´t have to watch out for my tendency to buy something, and then buy the same thing over again. With things that can be used up, that may not be so bad unless I buy more than I can use up before it goes bad. But non-perishables are one area where I have to be careful in the future to check whether I have something already before buying myself another one, before I find myself spending twice and then needing twice the space to store all that stuff.
After all, I still want to do that apartment remodel, and I don´t want to provide storage any more for things that are plain junk.



Julia

Old silhouettes and ancient hurts

The de-boxing project being in full progress, I attacked another box yesterday. In one of the drawers I found a small packet of photographs of myself, all of them more than twenty years old and therefore pre-dating my weight gain. I had stashed them away in there and almost forgotten about their existence.
Of course, before finding a new home for them, I looked through them.
Now, when I try to remember what I felt about my body back then, what comes to mind is the feeling of shame about it. I was totally convinced that I was looking grotesque and fat, courtesy, mostly, of that relative of mine who kept trying to force me to lose weight in order to conform to what he thought I should look like.
That insecurity is evident in those pictures in the way I stand.
What is also evident when I look at these pictures today is that back then there was no factual base whatsoever for anybody to call me fat. The pictures show a young woman with a narrow waist and curves in all the right places, a slender neck and face, and hips that were narrow enough to wear a size S pencil skirt over them.
The person in these pictures is slim. BMI 23 slim, so, normal-weighted. Right in the middle of normal.
I don´t know what my relative saw when he looked at me. When looking at those pictures I can´t even imagine what he would have wanted to see that would have satisfied his standards.
What I do know is that, in order to make me conform to said standards, he kept making disparaging remarks about my body, all centered around the theme of "you´re fat, ugly, clumsy, stupid and lazy".
He repeated these often enough to sink down into my own subconscious, making me, not conform to his impossible standards, but instead grow into a bad case of body hatred, insecurity, and general low self-esteem. All of which set me up for a lifelong battle against my body, an eating disorder, becoming a victim of a bullying boss at my first workplace, and several mentally abusive relationships. And for getting as fat in real life as he had made me believe I was back then.

I wish I could go back in time to tell that young woman that her tormentor is wrong, that she isn´t fat. I wish I could somehow spare her from the experiences that her abysmally bad self-image will get her into.
But that isn´t possible.
What is possible for me today is working through the hurt.
I can´t undo my life´s experiences, but I can bring that young woman back from the fat suit she has been imprisoned in for so many years, and then continue to live the life I might have had all the time had I but been able to realize what I, what my body, really was like. A life free of shame.


Julia

Sixty and counting...

Yup, that means exactly what it looks like. As per today, I have successfully condensed myself by sixty pounds.
You may have noticed I avoid using the word "loss" in that context- because I don´t ever intend to find these again. Or allow them to find me.
The knowledge that I will have to be careful what I eat for the rest of my life to prevent that from occurring is mitigated a bit by the fact that I am, this time, not forbidding myself anything, and most of the time, I´m not even feeling hungry.
My secret in a nutshell? 1500 calories and below 30 percent carbs as often as possible. And if I find I´ve gone above one or both- not beat up myself but try better the next day. Because it´s the long run that counts. If I stay on plan most of the time, one piece of cake or a bite of chocolate, or a single pasta dish, may raise my carbs above what I set myself as a limit for that day, but it won´t make all of the fat come back at once. And by judiciously allowing small portions of my favorite goodies, I find I can avoid bingeing on them whenever my willpower falters. The operative word being, of course, small.
And I will have to continue keeping tabs on what I eat, even when in maintenance, as well as weighing myself daily. Those two simple acts were what brought me down from this summer´s plateau.
So, I better keep them up, after all, there are thirty-six more pounds to go before I can call myself "normal"-weighted again.


Julia

Needles, pins and boxes

They come into your house looking harmless. They multiply when you´re not looking. They play hide-and-seek with you.
I´m not talking about white mice or guinea pigs, even though these fit the description, too.
What I´m talking about is those omnipresent wooden boxes with drawers in them. They come cheap, and they promise to bring order into the chaos of small parts that somehow seems to keep re-erupting in spite of any attempt at taming it.
I, too, have fallen into the trap of believing those boxes would finally bring order back into my possessions. What they did instead was allow me to avoid any decisions about the things I owned and did not use. Thus, I did, after several box purchases, end up with a whole battery of them taking up space in my bedroom. The little drawers on them are filled to the point of almost refusing to close with those diminutive items that I was afraid could get lost if I put them into a bigger container.
The problem is, once a piece has entered them, there it stays. Most of the time, I don´t even remember what is in there.
And the other problem is that these boxes, as well as the chests of drawers they sit on, would not find a place in our new bedroom if we were to do the exchange of rooms we´re planning.
That´s why I have started to eliminate them one by one. Yesterday´s candidate for eviction was fairly small, actually, just six little drawers. What I discovered in there- one drawer shock full of pinboard pins and paper clips. Now the pinboard those went with has left our household several years ago, so all they were good for was pricking the fingers of anyone opening that drawer unawares. As a matter of precaution, I dumped them on a tray first before tossing them, and lo and behold- there were also several padlock keys the locks to which were languishing in the next drawer. So, I reunited locks and keys, and dumped the rest into the trashcan. Next drawer- a bag of guest soaps that went into the bathroom to join our soap stack. Next one- bottles upon bottles of nail lacquer, which I put in the cosmetics drawer where they might even be used. Also in there, filling up two of the little drawers, were about a hundred ballpoint pens and colored pencils, plus, as if in testimony to where the boxes came from, a load of those little pencils that you get for free at a certain Swedish furniture store. After ditching the ones that were definitely broken, I corraled the rest into the pencil cases that were lying unused in another drawer, awaiting the great stationery purge I intend to do once I get all of my writing materials into one place. Result? One less box of drawers and the realization that a lot of what I had in there might have been tossed or used up long ago if I had not had that box to stash and hide it in.
Actually, that is the danger with every storage container. From the outside, it looks tidy no matter what you put in there. Whenever some small piece turns up, it is all too easy not to decide if you need it and dump it into a container instead.
The contents of most such containers are nothing but postponed decisions. And the decision doesn´t even get easier to make if you finally open that box or drawer, sift through the contents and find yourself wondering just what appliance or piece of furniture that oddly-shaped piece of plastic used to belong to.
So, I made two resolutions concerning those containers: I won´t buy new ones again, no matter how pretty or practical-looking. And the next time I am tempted to put something into such a container, I will first check whether the item in question needs to be kept at all, or if the better receptacle for it isn´t the trash can at once.

There are still four of the boxes left, plus all in all twelve big drawers that need sorting through, before I can decide what alternative storage to get to replace those with, if at all. After all, I´ve promised myself to eliminate everything I don´t need any more before I pick out any new furniture to store things in.

To be continued...


Julia

Balancing out Justin

The similarities between being overweight and being cluttered are something that makes me think real hard about those behaviors that are tacitly encouraged by our consumerist society.
Consuming food in amounts that are not conducive to our health or consuming stuff in amounts that are not conducive to our financial well-being or to order in our households- both are fuelled by the misconception that more of a good thing must be a better thing.
Actually, it isn´t. One bit of folk wisdom from DH´s family came from a male relative who used to say something that in English translates to "too much and too little is just the same thing".
The man was right.
The ancient Egyptians worshipped a goddess called Ma´at. She was the divinity in charge of "the right measure" or, in other words, the goddess of balance.
We seem, as a society, to have lost that balance long ago.
How else to explain the so-called obesity epidemic, or the rising number of people who are suffocating under mountains of debt and clutter and, in order to feel better, proceed to buy even more stuff with borrowed money, thereby effectively making said mountains grow even bigger?
Evolutionarily, perhaps, that kind of behavior even makes sense. In times of general scarcity of resources, the one who managed to secure for himself as many as possible of those resources had a decided advantage when it came to surviving, say, the next famine or the next ice-cold winter. "Having a lot" became synonymous with being secure.
In our times of an abundance the like of which has never been known before in the history of mankind,  this connection is something that must, at the very least, be redefined. In first-world countries, at least, there is mostly no danger of things running out or becoming unavailable anytime soon.
Thus, we´re called upon to find out the right measure of things to have or food to eat. The paleolithic forebears to whom we owe our clutter genes as well as the propensity for overeating are, in terms of asking how much of something is good for us, not exactly the best advisors to listen to.
If we ever should need it, it will be available.
How much of the space inside our homes is taken up by the glaring manifestation of the fact that we still refuse to believe that?
And- even worse-  how much debt has been incurred in order to fill our stashes of things who have entered our homes, not because we needed them at once, but "just in case" we might need them someday?
This Justin Case person is singlehandedly responsible for quite a significant percentage of clutter and debt.
Any time we invoke his name when buying something, what it really means is "I don´t need this right now". More often than not, it even means "I won´t ever need this". Either way, it means that another piece of clutter is about to enter our life and our habitation.
Simply by not catering to the pretended needs of Justin Case, we could save ourselves quite a lot of money and space.
So how does one tell them from legitimate foresight?
For me, the litmus test is asking myself whether I can reasonably expect to use the item anytime soon. What "soon" means depends on what item you´re looking at. For a winter coat or warm boots, it may mean "within a year". Same thing for an oven pan that holds a whole turkey, or a set of snorkeling equipment. If the item is already in my possession, I usually prolong the period of grace a bit before I toss it. But if I am in the process of acquiring it, I tend to be ruthless and set the time limit for using it no further than it would take me to get to the place where the item is sold again. (as in, we do not have a big electronics store where we live, so, if I go there twice a year and the item is, say, a USB stick that I may need in the future, I set the time limit to six months because I could, if I needed it later than that, buy it on my next visit).With items I could grab on every lunch break, that means strictly no buying in advance, unless it´s consumables and the last pack at home has already been opened and is being used.

Every Jew and Christian probably knows the biblical story of the manna in the desert. God gave the Jews who had just escaped from Egypt with little more than the clothes on their backs food that just had to be picked up from the ground. But there was a hitch to it- they were only allowed to pick up enough to feed them for that day. Anything more than that was spoiled and rotten by the next morning.  Generally, this story is interpreted as being about trust. They had to trust their God to repeat the miracle on the next day.
We are, in a way, called upon to make a similar leap of faith by trusting that most things we would bring into our lives "just in case" would still be available to us if ever said case should arise. Doing so frees up time, money and space in our lives that would otherwise likely end up wasted.


Julia

11.11.11.11.11.11

Here in Europe, we are approaching the number that will be the occasion for some weddings, as well as- in Germany- the official start of the karneval season. You will, today, experience a date that comes only once in a century- 11.11.11, 11.11.11. For just one second, all you´ll see on your digital timekeeping device will be the digit one. And, as digital timekeeping devices are a quite recent invention, our generation will be the first to have that opportunity.
After just one second, the number will have changed again.
There´s a lesson in that. Perfection of any kind is something that you may achieve- or think you´ve achieved- for a fleeting moment, only to have the law of entropy take over and have things revert to their usual less-than-perfect state. In contrast to that clock, you will likely have spent plenty of effort, only to find some of it, at least, going to waste faster than you can say Jack Robinson.
That doesn´t mean you should quit trying to get closer to perfection. Just don´t get frustrated when you can´t achieve it, or, after achieving it, can´t keep it up. Because, you know, the moment of time marked 11.11.11,11.11.12 has as many possibilities in it as the second preceding it, or the one that follows. And even if you´re not perfect, it´s up to you to be your very best in every second of your life.


Julia

Out of Dangerfield

It´s November, and the weather, after several weeks of unseasonable but welcome sunshine and temperatures in the high tens (centigrade), has finally decided to catch up with the season. So, for some days already, it has been foggy, humid and close to freezing. Which, of course, meant that my winter coat and warmer sweaters had to come out. Luckily, I stocked up on fitting sweaters last year, which I haven´t outshrunk yet (they are a little loose, but tolerably so).
With the colder weather,  I´ve also been exchanging my water cup for a cup of hot tea as a fixture on my desk (actually, it´s the same cup, which serves as well keeping water cold as it does keeping tea warm).

As I am approaching the limit below which I won´t be morbidly obese any more, I find that people approach me about my weightloss more often. Mostly, they do it somewhat hesitatingly, as if fearing to insult me, which IMHO is plain nonsense. Of course I look different- I just condensed more than half of my excess weight! And what with the amount lost, it would be strange indeed if the loss didn´t show at all.

One of the more humiliating moments of my career came one day when I came upon my secretary talking to a client on he phone, who seemed unsure of my name. She asked him whether he wanted to talk to Ms. Stambor, reminding him he´d met me on an earlier occasion, and then she burst out laughing hard at what he replied. Only later did she tell me that the man had asked, "was that the short fat one?" Realizing that this was what people remembered me for, not my professional abilities, was a real bummer.
And it was something I never got out of as long as I was fat. People would see me, and they´d immediately form a mental image of someone who was funny, gregarious, anything but the professional image I wanted for myself.
Since I have lost weight, I find a subtle but still perceptible difference in the way new clients approach me. What it boils down to is being treated more respectfully from the start. Not that I didn´t earn respect before, too, but there´s more of it to start with now. It may not be right, but it´s the way things are. Humpty Dumpty just doesn´t cut it as an authority figure, even in a business suit.  Of course, one could cry fat-ism and discrimination here, but to me, that meant having to be twice as tough and twice as competent in order to be professionally accepted.
My job is difficult enough as it is without dealing with any Rodney Dangerfield moments on top. So, yes, I am glad that these are becoming a thing of the past, along with those extra pounds that are condensing themselves off my body.


Julia

´tis the season...

For several weeks already, the shops and bakeries around here have been showcasing christmas candy. Cookies, lebkuchen and stollen, marzipan, cinnamon-flavored chocolates, the works. And today, there are workers underneath my office window mounting the christmas illumination on the streetlights. There´s no way to miss it- christmas is approaching fast, and with it, all those too-rich delicacies that go along with it.
As if that weren´t enough, letterboxes are regularly stuffed with catalogues featuring merchandise that no one- really no one- needs, but when it comes to christmas presents, it is bought, often by people who could use the money for other things they would need.
For many families, the pressure of the expectations that come with the holidays means the extra sress of having to procure all of those presents the kids clamor for off an already too-narrow budget, as in "it´s not christmas if there are no presents". The result, often, is additional debt that will continue to hound the family budget for months.
A merry time, in my book, works differently. Even if I remove the religious context, the holidays are meant to be a time for families to spend together, a time for reloading your batteries, so to speak. And that is not a function of the height of the stack of parcels under some unlucky coniferous tree that had, for the occasion, been dragged from its natural habitat to death and somebody´s living room.
And then, there´s decorations.  No other holiday in the course of the year breeds them like christmas. Santas, reindeers, angels, garlands, candles, and tree ornaments, which then go on to clutter storage spaces for the rest of the year.
Now, if there are small children in the house, it may be understandable if parents want to turn their houses into a wonderland of glitter and lights for the season.
But for those of us who do not have children, and those of us who do not have an attic or dry basement to store all of these ornaments after use, there must be a way to celebrate the holidays that is compatible with minimalism.
I have been working on that for several years already, and by now, we have a set tradition of what we do put up before and during the holidays that is sustainable and keeps clutter at a minimum.
First of all, I discarded all and sundry ornaments that were simulating the branches of trees, as in garlands and wreaths. I have a four-candle circular candle holder made from brass (thus, unbreakable) with  candle rings that look like small poinsettias that has been serving as an advent wreath for years. The only thing I have to do when setting it up is replace the candles every year. Then, there are, in total, about fifteen christmas-y figurines of different makes and materials which I spread out on surfaces all across the flat for a little festive touch, and which reside, out of season, in the china cabinets behind the plates, plus several brass vases and candlesticks (I used to collect these, might as well get some use out of them) and, for the dining table, one christmas-themed tablecloth. For the holidays proper, I have a big white christmas-tree-shaped candle that was a present from a dear aunt years ago, which of course has never been lit, but makes for a pretty decoration, plus a glass dish with several spherical glass ornaments originally intended for trees,and matching mirrored glass candle holders, to adorn the coffee table.
And that´s all. Of course, our best china and stemware will be used for the christmas dinner, and we will have incense cones and glühwein, nuts, and oranges, maybe even one or two natural fir branches to perfume the air, so, the place will be festive alright, but I, for one, don´t need to drag a whole tree inside for that.
All of the things I mentioned have been used and enjoyed for years. They can be put up in a jiffy, and taking them down and putting them away  is done in mere minutes. And the best thing about them is that they do not clutter up our flat, and, having been paid for years ago, are perfectly sustainable.
And after putting them up, there´s plenty of time for us to enjoy our clutter-free christmas-decorated home.


Julia

Double trouble

Sometimes going through one´s stuff yields some unexpected results. I went for the handbag department this weekend, as planned, and discovered not one, but three identical- or almost identical- pairings of handbags I had not been aware of owning. For one, I used, before the days of my fabulous multi-pocket vests, to carry a small zippered bag with a long, thin strap across my body, hidden underneath my jacket, to keep my wallet and keys from getting pickpocketed. I used to have these in black  and bright red, and I always thought I had one of each. This weekend´s roundup unearthed two of these bags in each color, one of them visibly worn and the other still looking brand new. I can´t even remember buying the second set! So, it was a no-brainer to toss the worn specimens. The third "twin set" consisted of two black shoulder bags, one of them slightly smaller, but these I kept both because they are both used regularly. What else went- a pink backpack that had become dingy over the years, apart from looking a bit too juvenile for someone well beyond her twenties, -a white handbag that I had originally intended to carry for my wedding, but when I put my stuff in in the morning, the magnetic closure came off, so, it didn´t close any more, and I used another bag for the occasion. I don´t know why I didn´t toss it at once because it was quite obvious the thing couldn´t be repaired, and by now, the white leather had turned rather yellowish (note to self: After being happily wed for four years, there´s absolutely no reason for me  to ever buy another white bag), -a white tote bag  that had been a hand-me-down from MIL, intended for putting my swimming stuff in, except I never go swimming and even with that much weight off, I don´t think I´ll ever be comfortable enough in a bathing suit to wear it in public, -plus diverse old wallets and purses that had long ago been put out of service and of which I don´t know either why I did not toss them at once. Also went two of the bags from my aunt that I had accepted because I liked  the color, but which both are highly impractical to use and thus had been lying around unused, and an old leather backpack I never used any more because it has just a magnetic closure, so it´s neither pickpocket- nor rainproof.  
All in all, the purge produced one big trash bag full of bags to take to donation, and one big empty drawer which now houses my winter hats. As these used to lie out on top of the wardrobe all winter long, this, too, means less visual clutter in our entrance area.
The lesson to be learned from what I found in my handbag collection is that it would have been a lot less cluttered had I, upon buying a replacement for some bag or purse, immediately proceeded to throw out the old one instead of keeping it for just in case. The other lesson is that it is not very likely I´d have to spend any money on handbags in the next years, being equipped with enough bags of different sizes and makes to carry me through any conceivable situation. There is an advantage to preferring relatively simple, classic styles and real leather there, because the bags I own now won´t go out of style anytime soon. Lesson number three-just because an item comes in two different colors, I don´t have to buy both, because I usually end up using just one of them anyway. And anything in a fashionable color, be it shoes or bags, will wear out a lot faster than good old black, navy, brown or burgundy. So, if I want a sustainable wardrobe, I´ll have to keep away from trying to jazz up my look with colorful leather goods. For that, I can use blouses, or scarves, or the occasional brooch.
Being busy with sorting out leather goods also took me to my belt collection, and there I found the only survivor of the belts I owned before becoming obese. It´s made from sturdy leather, and I had, for a long time, not even been able to bring the ends together around my waist. And now- I could even close it, albeit on the widest setting. That belt still has the extra holes I punched in it because it used to be too wide, so, it will be marking my progress back to having the waist I used to have.
All in all, the results of the weekend have been quite satisfactory. 
It´s actually quite educational to see which items I got rid of, because these are things I must not buy again.
After all, I´m getting older, too, and I have found out that most of  the flashy styles of my younger years simply don´t look as pulled-together as I like to look now. And things I would not use any more, I don´t have to keep either.After all, maybe there´s someone out there whose lifestyle they fit better than mine.


Julia

Old pictures and new dimensions

Going through old pictures sometimes brings some realizations that I didn´t have when first looking at them. Namely, how much I was in denial about what my body looked like, even though these pictures also tell the story of clothes I grew out of, jewellery that didn´t fit around my fingers and wrists any more, belts that refused to close around my belly and went into disuse, and chairs I didn´t use any more because I was afraid of crashing through them, or having the chair wedged to my thighs when trying to get up again.
By now, at about half my excess weight gone, my facial structure has begun to reemerge from the blubber it was hidden under for years, and so has my waist. Just being able to put my hands on my hips again, instead of sinking into a roll of fat, is an achievement. Having most of the too-tight rings fit me again, too.
I have, these last weeks, been losing rather steadily at a rate of about a pound a week, and it seems that I am by now in the zone where that leads to results I can notice, in contrast to the start of my weight loss journey when losing a pound hardly made a difference in how I looked and felt.
Besides, I think my body is once more rearranging itself, meaning that my pants size ( and the size of my posterior) has been rather stable while my torso and my legs seem to be the places I am losing right now. Not that I am overly sad about that, as the stable pants size means I didn´t have to replace the size 22 pants yet, and the slimmer thighs mean that they take a lot longer to wear through.
At my top weight, I had to replace my pants about once every three months because the material between my legs was getting holey and worn-through. The pants I have now I´ve had for about nine months, and they show hardly a trace of wear at all.
Being back at a weight I haven´t had for over ten years still takes some getting used to. I still hesitate in front of every tight spot (as in restaurant booths or doorways) that I wouldn´t have been able to navigate, and putting laundry on the clothes line I marvel at the fact that those diminutive-looking panties are in fact mine.Seeing the size M in my smallest fitting sweater is nothing short of a miracle. And I still glance at my reflection in every full-legth mirror I pass, every time almost expecting to see The Blob again.
Knowing that the third-degree morbidly obese version of me is a thing of the past feels great.
But I know that I will have to be careful of my food intake for the rest of my life if I never again want to go back to that place.
And I´m glad that this time, I have obviously found out what I had to change about what I eat in order to go to a healthier weight.
Describing the difference between what my body feels like now and what it used to feel like would probably sound like unabashed boasting. For me, it´s the difference between being handicapped and stuck inside a straitjacket of fat that kept me from more and more activities, and being free.
And if I managed to get out of that straitjacket, so can everyone out there who has been handicapped by their fat bodies. Just never ever ever give up trying. If what you do doesn´t work, try something else. But keep trying. Perhaps you, too, will find something that works for you, the same way I did. It has been taking me twelve years to find it, but in the end, I have, by exclusion of the things that didn´t work, found a way out of my fat prison.
Being morbidly obese doesn´t have to be a life sentence. Nor do the limitations it places on what you can do.
Even if I know (to stay with he legal imagery) that I will for the rest of my life be on parole and have to stick to being good, else I get back into that prison I never want to see the inside of again.


Julia


Julia

Taking time

It´s been two years now that I went from dragging home stuff to trying to get rid of stuff I had dragged home.
Some twenty to thirty (I didn´t count them) bags of trash and recycling have left the flat for good, plus a similar amount of too-big clothes. Of the several boxes of books, nothing to say.
The kitchen, by now, is pretty much decluttered. In the other rooms, at first sight I still haven´t made enough of a dent in the amount of stuff to be stored to really create some empty space. What I have reduced is the number of homeless items, meaning that almost everything has, by now, a place to put it away.
But- I haven´t yet been able to reduce the amount of storage needed. What I had hoped for was being able to declutter some of our shelving, too, but that hasn´t happened yet. We still have three armchairs, a big sofa plus three cocktail chairs in a living room used only by DH and me. There´s still an IKEA shelf on every wall except the one with the windows in it, using up every inch of free space there is. Even after sorting out things, I still have those four chests of drawers in my bedroom, with those wooden IKEA drawer boxes on top, and every one of them is filled with small items.
When I see pictures in catalogues of rooms with minimalist furnishings, I become envious. Imagining a whole wall with nothing but a picture and a couch in front of it. Or a living room where you don´t have to zigzag between chairs and armchairs to clean.
Things in my living room are more difficult to keep up with because what I have is mostly open shelving, with only a few closed cabinets in between. Open shelves mean horizontal space, and that, in turn, means things being placed there, in front of the books. I have removed the greater part of my own tchotchkes long ago, but DH has immediately occupied the liberated space with an army of picture frames. As these are family pictures, and DH is a real family man, there would not be any reasoning with him over them. Even limiting the number probably wouldn´t work. If we had been able to exchange the rooms as planned, I could, at least, banish the picture frames to his office. But in order to do that, some of the shelving in the living room would have to go. So, that´s the place where the cat catches his own tail. If I could but remove some of those shelves, we could rearrange our flat.
The meaning of that is all too clear. I have to declutter even more things, in the hope of finally emptying at least one or two of these shelves. And that will take some more time, as I can start bigger decluttering projects only when DH is away, or over the weekend. Besides, I have decluttered most of the no-brainers long ago, so the speed at which I can declutter even more is necessarily slowing down.
With winter approaching, perhaps I can do this in small increments. Just 15 minutes every evening, for example. Maybe there´ll be a visible result by spring.
Until then, I must remind myself that I took several decades to accumulate all this stuff. I can´t realistically expect to get rid of it at once. 


Julia