Shopping the gaps

The changing of the seasons, for me, meant, for the longest time, shopping.
First, making a tour of every clothes and shoe selling establishment in town to find out what the most recent must-haves were, then the acquisition of at least five big plastic totes full of garments.
At home, then, the attempt to squeeze those into the overflowing closets along with last year´s bounty, and that of the years before that. As it was, most of those clothes never even got worn because they had been pushed to the back of the closet, wedged in with way too many of their brethren.
And still I had that experience of standing in front of said overflowing closets uttering the immortal words "I have nothing to wear".
As I have been decluttering those garments that had become decidedly too big with recondensing myself, the first gaps appeared on the clothes racks. Now I haven´t finished recondensing yet, so any garment I´d buy right now would probably not fit me at goal weight, anyway. And that meant that those gaps were not filled back up by new acquisitions.
Guess what, I didn´t have to go bare. I didn´t even have to raise the frequency with which I´m doing laundry. The clothes I own today are completely sufficient for my needs, even though there are maybe half as many as I used to have. And by now, most of them get to see regular wear, too.
By now, I have successfully recondensed the greater part of my extra baggage, and come down to clothes sizes in the normal range. There´s  a high probability that the clothes I have would mostly still be wearable down to goal or at least close to it. So, this year, there was no shopping expedition (excepting one summer blazer I got on sale). Instead, I shopped my closet.
By now, I´ve grown so used to those gaps between garments on the rack that I don´t even have the feeling of missing something any more. Partly, that may be due to the fact that my body, by now, isn´t that fat any more. I feel better in it, and the frantic search for garments that would somehow camouflage my obesity is a thing of the past.
Besides, what with my limbs no longer squeezed against each other by the rolls of fat that had developed with weight gain, I have noticed that it takes me much longer to wear out a garment, so my existing stack will last me even longer.
For the time when I reach goal, my intention is to keep the number of garments small, replacing clothes as necessary but not piling them on the way I used to.
Not only will that save me from spending a substantial slice of my income on clothes I won´t even wear, or wear too rarely to justify their price, it´s eco-friendly, too.
And for the first time, there´s no need for pangs of conscience because I´d been wasting my time, my money, and my closet space on items I did not need or use.


Julia

That´s...bananas!

Just when I thought I´d seen it all....
but what I saw in a shop yesterday about topped it all...
The common banana, in its usual state, is in my experience a soft, easily edible food item. It comes with its own biodegradable wrapper.You can bite into it, cut it, or squash it with a fork. No special tools are required to enjoy one.
Or so I believed. Until I set eyes on...the Banana Cutter.
Yup, you heard me right. The thing looks like a pair of scissors with seven sets of blades, and it promises to deliver six perfectly spaced slices of banana with one cut. The price for this special tool? Twice what they demanded for a set of four kitchen knives that sat right next to it on the shelf.
So they expected patrons to buy something that
-had absolutely no practical value,
-could do only one job, and that probably not even well,
-would need a complicated cleanup after use,
-and was, as a unitasker, ridiculously overpriced when compared to the simple-to-clean, more versatile, and absolutely-sufficient-for-the-job-of-turning-bananas-into-slices humble knife next to it.

What struck me was that there were already some empty spaces on that shelf.

There really were people who were ready to spend their money on something like that. Enough money to pay for a full meal in a restaurant, and more than the average worker hereabouts earns in a full hour of work. Which means that whoever buys one of these is ready and willing to sacrifice more than a full hour of their life for the sake of acquiring such a useless piece of clutter.

I just doubt that they make that realization.
Calculating how long you need to work for the price of something you want to buy, a la "Your money or your life", is something that doesn´t come naturally. But when you look at it this way, it sometimes gets easier to avoid things that are destined to be clutter form the start.


Julia

Hot pants reloaded

Losing roundabout seventy pounds of fat has by now taken me down six clothes sizes. The most amazing thing about that being that I used to need a bigger size in bottoms than in tops. Not so any longer- I´m down to a German size 21 in pants, and size 22 in tops and jackets, which doesn´t cease to amaze me- I would never have expected my lower half to shrink further than my upper one.
Not that I don´t enjoy that, but the recondensing of my fat bottom has gone so fast that I didn´t get too much wear out of the size 22 pants I bought when I needed that size. Thus, these ended up in the wardrobe, almost unworn. I had tried the boil-and-shrink treatment on two light-colored pairs to no avail. But I still had two other pairs of dark denims, which I had hesitated to wash at the highest setting because I was afraid they might get too washed-out.
Still, having spent the money on them just to have them relegated to the back of the closet kept vexing me. At their original size, they had become so baggy as to be practically unwearable.
So, this weekend I finally bit the bullet and threw them in the washing machine, at the highest possible setting.
Guess what, these did shrink. Quite exactly by the equivalent to one and a half clothes size. Which makes them, right now, the best-fitting denims I own.
As I still tend to wear through the inside of my pants legs (I have done that even before getting fat, it´s something to do with the way I walk), I had been watching my only pair of size 21 denims with some apprehension for the appearance of that dreaded surface of worn-through cloth.
Now, I have three pairs of dark denims that fit me, which means that I will be able to forgo pants shopping for awhile yet. Actually, I am now saving my size 21 jeans because if I do recondense by another size, I´ll just give them the same treatment and voila- size 20 jeans! All for the price of a load of laundry.
Perhaps I should try to shrink the lighter ones some more, too.
The thing being that I would, formerly, just have given away those perfectly good pants and bought new ones in the smaller size.
But this is so much better.
Waste not, want not.


Julia

Meltdown time

Summer has finally arrived, as usual this year, with a twenty-degree jump in temperature. Not my kind of weather, really, especially when the heat arrives so suddenly. Just where did they put those slow temperature rises from April to June this year? That way, my body could at least adapt to the heat.
On the weight loss front, no news, really. My weight has been dithering around that ten-kilo notch for over a month, with a slight (four pounds from the lowest point I had reached) regain. And what with the summer heat, I can almost count on there being some bloating and water retention to go with it. Oh well. The good part is that I´m still below morbid obesity, and I´ll have to be more careful about avoiding carbs if I want to stay there. The problem being that I did have unusually strong cravings for carbs during the last weeks. I don´t know if it´s the change of seasons (had the exact same thing going on last year, and my weight loss stalling for about six months), but I fully intend to fight it this time.
Keep calm and carry on...


Julia

The case for ebooks

As I mentioned before, I have to ride by train quite often.
And I am what they call a bookworm.
As our local library is, er, rather badly stocked, that used to mean buying the books I wanted to read. WHich in turn meant an ever-growing accumulation of dead tree with words on it in my living-room.
Now, some books for me are definite keepers. They get read and re-read, cherished, and kept.
Unfortunately, even if I´m careful, there´s just so much life in a pocketbook edition. The paper yellows, and at some point, the binding comes apart. Many books aren´t even sold in hardcover, and those which are sell for prohibitively high prices. It´s not unusual for a hardcover to fetch four to five times what the pocket edition might cost. So, buying the hardcover is absolutely restricted to perennial known favorites.
My book collection, therefore, is mostly pocket editions. The only way to keep these without cluttering up the look of my living room is behind closed doors, and I have just so many closed compartments in my IKEA shelf.
The answer to that is culling. Ever so often, I remove the books I no longer read, the ones that are outdated, and the ones that have become too dingy to openly display. Still, there are plenty of open shelves with books in them, making the room appear untidy. Not the leather-backed, gold-lettered books that are as decorative as they are entertaining. Just the usual cheaply-bound motley stuff.
Enter the ebook.
What kept me from embracing those earlier was that I believed you had to buy an ebook-reader to be able to enjoy them. At the prices they demand for these, I haven´t yet been ready to splurge on one. But now they (internationally operating internet book dealer whose name I won´t mention) have an application for your ordinary windows based PC that allows you to read their electronic goods, and that app´s for free!
What´s more, a lot of classic books can also be downloaded for free. Add to that the regular specials where you can buy an ebook for a steeply discounted price for a short period of time, and the fact that the ebook edition of almost any book is cheaper than the paper one, plus if I were to ever buy the ebook reader of that company my downloaded books will follow me there, too.
I´m in luuuuurve!
Plus, as those books take up no more physical space than the netbook I read them on (which is preexisting), my reading habit no longer contributes to the clutter in our living room.
I am, actually, successively acquiring the electronic editions of my favorite books- perhaps my library will be almost exclusively digital someday. And my bookcases a lot emptier. After all, as long as I d not invite visitors that I could make an impression on with overflowing bookshelves, what good are they?
I used to equate possession of books with being cultured. Owning books on many topics meant I was a person of many interests. Having a big library of the classics meant I had a good education.
In the age of digital media, that reasoning no longer cuts it. Even the textbooks of information I need on the job are available online.
The wall-high bookshelves, therefore, will probably be no longer necessary one day.
And that will be the day I am a step closer to a minimalist living rooom.


Julia

Boxing k.o.

In case you wonder, I haven´t taken up pugilistics. But a fight I did have over the weekend, namely with a stack of big rolling plastic containers that are supposed to go under beds to store stuff.
What with my decluttering project going on for several years now (and still not finished), most of these boxes had become redundant and relegated to the cellar, pending a decision on their fate.
Now, whenever I moved in the past, I had been preferring to use plastic containers over cardboard boxes. The ones from the last move are still in our cellar, stacked on top of and into each other. Most are also empty. The under-the-bed boxes had joined the lot because I thought I might use them if ever I were to move again.
This weekend, we had decided to do a bit of cellar decluttering, and those boxes were the first thing that came to mind. I don´t ever intend to stuff boxes of clutter under my beds again- bad feng shui, and besides they just collect dust and make the place harder to clean. So what about using them when moving- a box that is as wide as a bed and just two hands wide in depth might hold some items, but in all honesty these would be a b**ch to carry when loaded.
So what were they good for- absolutely nothing, except add to the clutter in the basement.
Which is why they went to the local recycling pickup place, along with a whole heap of reusable shopping bags that had accumulated over time, as in "I need just one more bag to carry this weekend´s shopping" or "drat, forgot to bring my bag, now how do I carry these heavy glass bottles home?". Whenever I have too many of those bags, I put them in the cellar to await the next recycling run.
The result of Saturday´s activities is by no means a tidy basement. But I did gain a lot of space back, which might just make going through the non-empty containers down there a bit easier.

Every bit helps.


Julia

Waste to waist to wait

For all too long, that´s what my grocery shopping went like:
Go to the closest supermarket, grab one of their oversized shopping carts, and fill it to the point of overflowing with all those delicious-looking things they had for sale.Then haul it to my car, squeezing in the four to five bags of merchandise such a cart amounted to, drive it home and drag it up the stairs to my flat. Then try to squeeze all of it into my fridge.
Most of the time, that meant removing at least one trash bag full of expired items first.
At the time, I thought that was the way things were if I wanted my pantry to be well-stocked all the time.
Well-stocked, to me, meant having any item I might wish to eat in the house all the time. So, I took home ten different kinds of cheese, because I couldn´t know which one I´d want to eat the next day, could I? Or three different loaves of bread, or five kinds of yoghourt, or six different packs of sausages.
All of these, of course, are highly perishable items, with a shelf life of sometimes less than a week. Having all of them in my fridge at once meant I could either eat them before they went bad, or I´d have to throw away what I couldn´t eat in time.
So I ate as much of them as I could and threw away the remaining packages as soon as they expired.

Just how dumb can you get? I regularly spent way too much money to buy too much food, ate too much "to keep it from going to waste" and still ended up having to throw away too much of it.
The force driving that insanity was fear. I was afraid that I might want to eat a certain food and find myself out of it. I imagined that I would, in that case, completely binge on whatever else I had on hand. The overstuffed fridge meant security. It also meant that I could make my eating decisions at the spur of a moment, eating whatever I happened to have a yen for.
It also meant I got fatter and fatter abusing my body as a bipedal waste bin gobbling down foods about to expire.

When I started out  on my weight loss journey two years ago, the first thing I decided on was a grocery shopping ban. I found out that I could live off what I already had in my fridge for several weeks before I had to go shopping again. With reducing the size of the portions I ate came the realization that I can really fit everything we need to eat in a week into just one of those reusable shopping bags.
I had to give up the idea of having everything always available for that, of course. Now, I have to decide when in front of the cheese shelf whether I want to eat gouda or emmental cheese that week, or in front of the yoghourt shelf whether I want greek or strawberry that week.
Guess what, I did not binge the first time I had a yen for camembert cheese, but only gouda in the fridge.
I just ate a piece of gouda, and - stopped eating. The world didn´t end.
And the next time I went grocery shopping, I was free to decide whether this week´s cheese selection would be camembert or something else. As far as I remember, it was something else.

It does not matter whether I have a special food on hand or not, as long as I have enough to eat.
It does not matter if the fridge appears half-empty, as long as what´s in there is enough to feed us until the next grocery shopping day.
I took a long time to arrive at those conclusions. Absurdly so. But arriving at them has meant cutting down on our grocery bills, by more than half, and cutting down on food waste, too.
What my obsession with being stocked up fully with all my favourite foods has cost the environment before I saw the light, I cannot know. What I do know is that now I buy only as much food as will be consumed, and the amount of things we have to throw out because they have spoiled has gone down to almost zero.

And I feel a lot better for it. When I am not thinking about how much food and money I wasted over the years before I realized what I was doing wrong, that is, because then I could kick myself for being stupid.


Julia

Gee-raniums!

The last weeks have been extremely busy, what with DMIL´s birthday and the Great Spring Cleaning at her place, which this year meant also getting rid of some of her patio plants that had frozen to death in this winter´s late-coming deep frost period. As they had been living in their respective containers for several years, that meant having to disassemble them- and their roots-and getting our hands pricked in the process by the dried-out juniper plant- as usually, we´d been looking in vain for the gardening gloves we just knew DMIL had, only to find them when putting away the saw we had used on the plants... Anyway, in spite of all resistance, that juniper is now gone, as well as a bunch of overaged planting containers.
Speaking of those, this weekend, at our place, was Geranium Day. I´ve put the balcony boxes back up, and this year I planted them with red upright geraniums which hopefully will, if they get a bit bigger, provide excellent cover from the nosy neighbours on the opposite side of the back yard.  The herb garden I didn´t replace yet, as they had only a few scraggly-looking lavender bushes at the garden store. But even with the pots I´d put the herbs in still stacked underneath the balcony table, just having the boxes planted and the one surviving oleander bush from last year plus a new cherry laurel plant outside again, ready to bloom, feels good. Now if the weather were to get better again...
As for the plants I tried to get through the winter inside, only one lavender bush, one rosemary, and one of the oleander bushes have survived hibernation. The cherry laurel and the boxwood plant I should better have taken inside, as they, too, did succumb to the extreme cold in January and had to be discarded. Which, for future winters, means I have to take any plant inside which I want to keep for the next year, and it also means limiting myself to no more plants than what I can put into the staircase to hibernate- those potted herbs did not take too well to our cozy heated flat. 

On the weight loss front, being at DMIL´s for almost two weeks did, of course, play havoc on my efforts. As DMIL won´t eat many of the things I´d cook for ourselves, I had to stick to traditional German cooking, and because she is such a finicky eater I had to eat of what was served, too, so as to not have her stop eating just because I did. Which meant a gain of four pounds which hasn´t come off again yet. But at least I stayed below the limit of morbid obesity.

So, it´s back to business as usual again. I´ll see how long it takes to repair the damages...


Julia