Let the madness end

Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is madness. I disremember who said this first, but it is rarely more true than during those frantic, food-loaden last two months of the year.
There we are, having spent ten months of the year (hopefully) watching our budgets and our food intake. Our waists have shrunk, our bank accounts have, while not fattened up, at least recovered a bit from last December's low. Toys, gadgets and trinkets bought last Black Friday have, predictably, given up the ghost simultaneously with the expiration of their warranties and gone on (again, hopefully) to cease cluttering our lives.
And then come along...The Holidays.
And with them that heady mixture of "I was so good all year, I deserve a reward" and "it's a holiday, and on holidays one does eat certain foods, and gives each other lots of presents".
So we find ourselves in the middle of the Black Friday melee again, clutching our shopping-bags full of loot that was payed for with our credit cards, or sitting at the Thanksgiving dinner table having to open our belts and grabbing for the Maalox (tm).
Of course, it doesn't stop there. We go on like that all the way through Christmas, gorging ourselves and shopping as if stores went out of business, without a thought about our scales or bank balances.
Six weeks of free-for-all.
Except it isn't free.
Do you remember what it felt like last January? Going on the scales for the first post-holiday weigh-in? Opening that horrifying credit card bill?
Feel that pain now. Remember it as vividly as you can.
Remember how long it has taken you to undo the damages, if you even managed to undo them at all.
And then decide if you want that again.
Remember- the holidays are not about consumption. They are about people.
When you look back at your childhood, what do you remember about Christmases past? What presents you got? Or do you remember going sleighing with your parents, or sitting in front of the open fireplace playing Scrabble (tm) with your siblings?
What do you want your kids to remember, or yourself if you don't have any?

You decide.
Decide wisely.


Julia

Shopping my closet

As I've mentioned before, I used to be an avid collector of handbags. During one of my latest decluttering marathons, I got rid of a number of specimens that just did not fit my needs any more, and I'm happy to report that not a single one of them has been missed. The drawer in my handbag storage chest that used to hold them now contains winter hats and scarves,which have ceased to clutter my entrance area.
Still, there were a few specimens left which saw relatively little use, but were too good to toss.
One of them is a sturdy leather shoulder bag which I had originally intended to hold my netbook, but it turned out that the opening was just a tad too tight to comfortably put it in or remove it. Thus, said bag went into hibernation in my closet.
Last week, I decided to take the plunge and acquire a tablet computer. I had actually vacillated between a tablet and an ebook reader for quite a while, since I had discovered that Amazon has reading apps for tablets, too. As I am not exactly a teenager any more, the size of the letters in what I read has become increasingly important, so, any device with too small a screen would be out of the question because of eyestrain. Then again, the netbook, while rather sturdy, weighs in at more than four pounds if I take along the cables for loading it, too, which meant that I would need to use a backpack to carry it or have my back hurt from carrying it on one side.
What kept me from exchanging it for a tablet was the prohibitively high prices those things usually are sold for.
Enter my friendly phone provider and an inductory offer on a tablet with cell phone connection that meant that I could swap my existing contract for one at the same monthly cost but with higher speed and receive a tablet for half what a 3G-capable Kindle would have cost me. So, my tech equipment got a new addition. I was, of course, lucky in that my old contract was running out right now, so I could go for that offer without penalties to pay. It really pays to keep the expiration dates for a contract in mind sometimes.
The new tablet, of course, needs something I can carry it in, which also must protect the screen from damages. After seeing the prices they demand for made-for-this-tablet sleeves, and seeing that they are mostly too soft to really protect the screen from damage by accidental pressure, I decided to go shop my closet instead. An old netbook sleeve was soon found, but the neoprene was only good against scratches, not for screen protection. What item could I use for that? It had to be flat, stiff and about the size of the tablet. What I settled on for the time being is the backside of an old picture frame. I put the tablet into the sleeve and then into a bag with the screen side facing the particle board piece. Thus, it's safe from damage. This works only with a bag that is small enough so the whole thing cannot slide around and stays together.
And that meant the reactivation of the aforementioned shoulder bag. While it was too small for the netbbok, it fits the tablet as if it were made for it.
I might upgrade the whole thing to a proper case someday, but for now I have what I need to carry that tablet without spending a dime on it, everything coming from my closet.
Including the shoulder bag.
There used to be a time when I would have gone out to buy a new bag for a new gizmo. I'm glad I don't need to do that any more.
Shopping my closet is something that did, at first, not come naturally. But with more experiences like this, it keeps getting easier.


Julia

The fruits of uncluttering

This weekend was, once more, wardrobe rollover time, meaning that my summer clothes went into storage until next spring, and the warm sweaters and fake fur hats and the other cold-season stuff went to take their places in the readily accessible part of my wardrobe.
In years past, before my weight loss, that used to mean wrestling with at least four of those zippered things I use to store my out-of-season clothes in, digging through them, and spending at least two hours doing so.
Not so this year. Having gotten rid of every piece that had become too big for me when I packed the winter stuff away last spring, I just took out the remaining stash, replaced the summer t-shirts and such where the sweaters had been, and put the (one) zippered box needed for that back on top of my closet. Total time spent- ten minutes. Then I took my warm jackets out and the thin ones back in (five minutes) and I was done. There wasn´t any garment I needed to toss, and the fact that my formerly overcrowded closet rods hold, by now, only the clothes that right now fit me also means that the things I store on hangers don´t have to go into storage any more- I just push the out-of-season stuff to the less accessible side of the closet.
What used to be an endeavour taking up the better part of an afternoon has thus become a fifteen-minute project.
What´s more, having gotten through one winter already on what I have in my wardrobe right now, I know that I won´t have to buy anything new this winter. Which suits me just fine.
There must be some "up" side to that weight plateau and slight regain, mustn´t there?


Julia

The measure of enough

For the longest time, whenever I was bored, I took my boredom shopping. The glitter and sounds of the mall distracted me from feeling lonely. A chat with the salespeople or the person at the cash register made up for the human contacts I did not have otherwise. In a period of my life that preceded a rather nasty separation, hanging out at the mall saved me from having to go home and face the situation there.
Being there, of course, meant acquiring something. Sometimes it meant acquiring anything at all, just for the small surge of feeling good that came with each purchase. And most of the time, it meant acquiring something that I actually did not need.
I liked to drink flavoured teas of different kinds, so I was fair game for each and any offer of tea drinking paraphernalia. Cups, teapots, tea sieves, lacquered containers to put the tea in.
Or clothes- in the search for something that would make me look slim, or at least less fat, no week passed without my dragging home a new garment.
Or books. If I didn´t find anything else to buy, I could always drop by the bookstore.
Slowly but inexorably my flat filled with stuff. Soon, there was more stuff than I could put away. So, I bought shelves, boxes, and others of those products that promise order out of chaos.
But these, too, filled up, and still there was stuff streaming in at a steady rate.
What with stashing stuff in those boxes, just finding any particular item was beginning to be a chore. Having to triple-stack my books in overflowing shelves meant looking for a particular tome became a veritable treasure hunt.
I had reached the point where it was all too often more convenient to purchase another edition of the same item than to hunt up the one I knew I had somewhere.
I had also reached the point where the mere thought of my stuff was sufficient to freak me out. 

And then I separated from my partner of ten years for reasons of terminal incompatibility. That also meant that I had to (gasp) move to a smaller flat.
I spent several weeks culling the contents of, at least, my bookshelves. As for the household goods, it was supposed to be an amicable separation, so I let the ex have a rather generous pick of the contents of the kitchen cupboards. It was, actually, not even making a sizable dent into what I had.
To tell the truth, neither any of the books I tossed, nor any of the plates and cutlery, or kitchen electronics, nor any of the furniture I also let him take away, has ever been missed by me.
The same thing goes for the at least twenty flower pots, the trampoline, or the second set of stereo equipment.
For weeks in advance of the move, the trashcans at our place were overflowing. I also made several runs to the dump, every time dropping off a full carload of stuff.

When I moved the rest of my possessions to my new, smaller flat, I had for the first time in ages whittled them down to a point where I could, if I set up shelves in every room, really put everything *away*, meaning that there wasn´t anything left that did not have a home of its own.
The purging of several boxes full of tchotchkes that had been bought during the former relationship also made the place look tidier and more roomy.

I wish I could say it stayed that way. Alas, my shopping habits had not changed. Slowly, new pieces crept in, again filling the place up. And then there was DH, who moved into my flat with all the trappings of a second household in his wake.
So, I had to make room for these, too. Which meant that all of a sudden, the place was more stuffed than it had ever been, with half of it (or almost) not even mine to decide about whether it should remain....
The feeling of overwhelm that came with that was all too familiar.

Only now, I had that memory of better days when I could and did keep the place tidy.
And I remembered what I had to do to get to that place: toss the excess.
What kept me from starting at once was the belief that I had already let go of everything tossable.

I started out slowly, with the double sets of kitchen stuff. I had to take DH into the boat, of course, and together we picked out the things we had two of and tossed the lesser quality ones. Some gadgets I wasn´t ready to altogether part with, plus some sets of china that held too many memories of the ex, were boxed up in the cellar. (I know that´s only prolonging the inevitable, but at least they were out of my kitchen).

Strangely, or rather, to-be-expectedly, the mess did still not grow smaller. Until the day I reinforced my decluttering with a shopping embargo.
Because what I had done was make some room, and then proceed to fill it up again with new stuff. Only when I stopped shopping for new stuff, did I really start to generate free space in our flat.
I also started to question my conviction that I had nothing more to toss.
Life changes. So do the things we need for our present lifestyle.
I used to serve food on large-diameter plates. I found out that was one of the reasons I got fat. The large-diameter plates went out of use, and on to the trashcan.
I used to own at least ten different sets of trekking poles because I needed them to walk. I can walk without crutches again, so I kept just two sets of poles for DH and myself, should we ever want to go trekking.
I used to wear plenty of make-up to bolster my then-fragile self esteem. I ceased doing so when I started to lose that excess weight. Today, I keep one set of makeup for the case of there being some event to attend, the rest has been tossed.
My teapot collection, while it´s still rather sizeable, has been freed from all the specimens that would drip, or be too difficult to handle when full.. And it´s been quite a while since I last bought a new one. 
Of the china we use now, there are no more than two sets of each- not six because there might be visitors.

The best thing about all this is that there is finally free space in our flat, and it´s growing along with our decluttering.
By now, whenever I consider a purchase, I decide up front where the thing will go. If there´s no space left, something else would have to go- which quite often leads to the discovery that I am not ready to give up the old piece for the new, which means the new thing stays unbought.
I found out that works best with shoes and handbags...:).

I intend to continue on my decluttering mission, to the point where the things I do not need which are inside my household will be outside my household.
Sometimes, that requires brutal honesty with oneself . It requires exposing the fantasy selves whose equipment is stashed away under the bed or inside the wardrobe. It requires admitting to myself which hobbies, or activities, that I once thought would be great to do, have either never become a part of my life, or I stopped doing them many years ago. It requires admitting to myself that I have grown older. It requires admitting to myself which clothes, or accessories, are just a bit too... youthful for someone approaching middle age (I refuse to admit I might be there already).
And it requires facing all of those insecurities that I tried to hide behind all this stuff.

Because stuff may cover up insecurity on the outside. But it never cures it.

So, I keep on decluttering.And finding room to live the life I want, without being dragged down by the stuff of the past.


Julia

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

Stretchy things and too much cleavage

Did that get you to open this post?
Actually, it´s not as funny as you might think. You see, when I put on that cotton blouse yesterday, I found out that my chest circumference has gone down quite a bit since last summer. And that means that all of my summer blouses I bought at my former weight are getting quite loose up front. That´s not so bad if they button up to my neck, but I have several favorites that have the buttons end about two hands´width benath my throat. When worn by a person of the size they were made for, that´s not too bad in terms of modesty, but now, I can either put a vest on top (and button it) or I might wear a scarf (not so great when it´s hot). Otherwise, the act of bending forward, or even standing opposite someone who is taller than me, will provide any person opposite me with some unwanted insights in the workings of my wardrobe. Having my bra peek out is where I draw the limit of cleavage.
When I was at my top weight, I bought myself, in a last-ditch effort to contain my condensable matter, a whole drawer full of spandex tops in different colors. These are, as they look like ordinary tank tops, modest enough to be peeking out, but...these are getting wide, too!
Replacing all of them would, at the prices they demand for those things, cost half a fortune.
But there´s a chance I won´t have to yet. You see, back then I bought way too many of them, and went on to put them into a drawer for storage. And that means that only the top ones have seen substantial use, while there are actually ones that were pushed to the back of that drawer unworn and remain so to this day. They´re skintone, too, so won´t show through a white blouse. And I discovered, when pulling them out, that the ones I have been continually wearing must have become stretched out beyond the material´s ability to snap back, because the unworn ones are still sufficiently tight even on my new shape to be worn, even if they are not as tight as the manufacturer´s size recommendations would have it. 
Which means sorting out the stretched ones and wearing the new ones as long as possible.
And another shopping trip avoided.
The sheer number of such items I have bought, as well as the fact that there are so many of them still unworn after about seven years, is actually a big red flag for me. Even if something works for me, I do not need more of them than I would need in a maximum of two laundry cycles. Everything above that will likely end up as wardrobe clutter.
Actually, of course, I had been so glad to have found them in my triple x L size at all that I thought I had to buy a stash of them to last me for the next ten or twenty years. What I hadn´t counted on was the possibility that I would lose that excess weight before they were worn out.
But that´s what has happened, and now I have reached a point where I know that even the as yet unworn ones will be too wide soon, if I continue condensing myself. Then again, if and when I´ll have to go shopping for a smaller size, I can tell now how many I really need. As many as there are stretched-out ones in that drawer. And not a single one above that.
It sometimes seems as if the topic of portion control were something that keeps coming back for me. The difference between enough and too much.
But I´m working on it.


Julia

Sneaking out of my vices

I´m still deliberating with myself about when and how to quit smoking again. Well, actually, I keep coming up with excuses why I don´t just stop, period.
What I did today was buy the "light" version of my brand, which has half as much nicotine according to the package, in the hope of getting my body weaned off the high doses of nicotine it´s used to before going cold turkey. I don´t know if that will make it easier, but it´s as close as I dare to go to quitting today without, well, actually quitting. 
If I compare my different vices, there´s certainly a difference between being- a smoker, -a compulsive shopper,  -a compulsive overeater. And it´s one that should give me hope that I can kick that nicotine habit, namely, that with shopping and eating, I will never reach the point where I can forgo the activity completely, therefore, I am in both instances forced to find the sweet spot of balance between too little and too much. On the other hand, I do not face having to give up the activity for good, so I´ll still be able to enjoy a good meal, or a good bargain if it´s something I really need.
With cigarettes, I have found out the hard way that there is no middle ground for me. Either I don´t smoke at all, or I smoke a pack a day. So, if it´s not the latter I want, I will have to quit again. The good thing being that, apart my nicotine addiction screaming for more, there is no reason at all to ever smoke another cigarette.
Now if I could just get that little voice to shut up that keeps me grabbing for the pack of cigarettes whenever things get stressful... and avoid grabbing for the pack of peanuts instead...



Julia

Slow motion

For a couple of days, my beloved netbook has been driving me crazy because things were moving so slowly that it felt as if there were some kind of digital syrup clogging up the machine. I could- to pun on what I heard is an Indian greeting-almost say "ram ram" to every pixel appearing- before the next one appeared, that is. Yesterday, things came almost to a standstill. After fighting the settings for a whole day, uninstalling each and every program not absolutely needed, I managed to wrangle the most recent edition of the anti virus program I use on the machine, which I had intended to do anyway as the older one´s license was running out. Guess what, my little machine is back in working order.
What really has me p.o.´d is the nagging suspicion that the makers of that program have something inserted there which will slow down your machine should you chose to ignore the permanent reminders that your license is about to run out. I had been doing that for about two weeks because I wanted to use up every bit of time on my old license before installing the new version. Now, I had to give up on two whole days, but I have a working machine again. Oh well.

For the stainless steel pan dilemma, my parents called me yesterday asking me what present I´d like for my impending birthday.You can guess I had the description of a certain something on hand. I´ll see if I´ll get it. It would be free for me, and hopefully save me from being given something useless that is clutter from day one (they have been known to do that). As I have been flying circles around one of those pans for quite a while I think it´s a good application for a wish, if I have one free.
Of course, I will have to wait until my birthday to get it, which is something that I had, in the past, rarely done. If I saw something I liked, I had to have it, at once. Quite often, I carried the item home, stashed it away somewhere, and promptly forgot about it as fast I had seen it.
The only way to counteract this was to install a rule of never, ever, buying something at first sight. Only if I keep returning to something over a period of several weeks , or at the very least several days if it´s something cheap, will I buy it. I have found that these items, the ones where the decision to buy is fuelled by a desire going deeper than just the surface attraction of something glittery or pretty, the ones where the purchase has been thought about weighing the pros and cons, are the ones that, in the long run, give me the most satisfaction for my money. They are also the ones that get used instead of just cluttering up our flat. 
Postponing my wishes is thus doubly useful. It´s frugal, and it keeps clutter out.
And seeing some pretty piece of bric-a-brac in a shop no longer means having to store that particular piece for the next years. I used to think I had to own such things in order to enjoy them. Today, I enjoy them when passing them by in a shop, I may have a good laugh at some particularly funny coffee mug, but I don´t have to take it home to enjoy it.
And not buying at first sight also keeps me from one of the more insidious shopping traps, namely, the trap of being in a foreign city not knowing when I´ll be back there. Quite often, I ended up spending more than I intended because I put myself in that "last chance to get this" mindset.
Actually, the internet helps a lot there. Knowing that I could order almost anything online, plus knowing that I could still do so after a waiting period, works wonders to take the urgency out of shopping. Nowadays, when I am window-shopping, I mostly use that as an opportunity to see what something looks like in real life so I won´t have to depend on an internet photo to decide whether to buy it.

This morning´s weigh in gave me quite a surprise because the whole gain of the weekend is off again, so, it definitely was water retention. Which gets me back to the fact that I had, over the weekend, eaten bread and potatoes. It seems my body is reacting ever more strongly to those, as everything else I ate were things I eat all the time without retaining several litres of water afterwards.
And today´s number is low enough that I can hope to reach the land of Just Overweight before my b-day yet.


Julia

Lent(e)ment

If I remember correctly from my school times, that´s French for slowly. Which is exactly how things on the weight loss front are moving. The weekend´s five-pound (ugh) gain is coming off at a rate of a pound a day, which means it´s still somewhat over four pounds to the Promised Land of No Longer Obese.
With Lent beginning today, I have decided to stick to a meatless diet until Easter, which means plenty of fish and poultry instead.
It also means changing my breakfast habit from "bacon and eggs" to just eggs. As DH still will be eating meat, I prepare two portions of eggs every morning- one with and one without bacon.
That means I use two small pans, too. Yesterday, in preparation for this morning, I thought about what I needed today, and, being at work, went to look for a small stainless steel pan (no teflon coating) to use. Only when I stood in the mall in front of a display of small stainless steel pans, did I remember that I had bought one exactly like that- last year. Which, of course, is still perfectly serviceable. So, it was like "duh, I´m forgetful" and I had my lesson on where all those double items in my household must have come from. Remembering that I need something and completely forgetting I already have it.
Before starting on my shopping embargo, I would not have thought twice about buying another of those pans. I consider it a step forward that this time, I realized in time that I was about to spend money to re-buy something I already had.

Something else, unfortunately, seems to have gone completely missing, namely, the stainless steel pans with a larger diameter I used to have. I can remember taking them out of my pot rack after buying several teflon-coated pans. I had thought that they were in the cellar along with the extra china, but it looks like they got tossed along with some cheapo pots I used to have. While these weren´t exactly high-quality, I have read enough by now on the dangers of teflon and such to kick myself for buying a set of nonstick pans at all. So, if I really did declutter those steel pans, that would make them the one and only thing I really regret tossing out. Replacing them won´t be easy, nor cheap, as most shops around here seem to have nothing but nonstick pans any more, unless you are ready to pay half a fortune for some professional-quality pan. At least, I still have a single-portion-sized stainless pan which means I can do my fish frying without having to resort to the nonstick ones (for meat, I use my cast iron ones, but if you use these for fish, the smell will linger for a long time, and I don´t have a spare cast iron  pan to dedicate to just frying fish). I´ll have to go through the cellar once more, perhaps I did yet keep those pans.
Until then, I´ll have to live with the results of my decisions. Doesn´t everyone.


Julia

Sales temptation

It´s cold outside. Cold enough to freeze some important parts off a brass monkey, as they say.
And the sweater problem still hasn´t been solved.
So, I have gone to work lately wearing a woolen vest over a turtleneck sweater, topping it off with MIL´s hand-me-down fur parka. Warm enough as it is, but the fur parka is a bit of a pain. For one, I can´t use my usual knapsack or anything with a shoulder strap with it so as not to break off the fur. So, I have to carry my netbook inside what is usually my overnighter bag that can be carried using one hand. If one is used to having one´s  hands free, that´s quite a nuisance. Besides, the thing sheds worse than one of those hungarian shepherd dogs, so, my dark-blue woolen vest looks as if I´d recently acquired canine company.
So, the thing is somewhat impractical to wear. And it totally doesn´t match my usually simple style. Top that off with the fact that, cold or not, I´m right now the only person at the office wearing fur, and therefore drawing quite a bit of unwelcome attention to myself, I´d rather wear a simple down jacket or something like that. Except I don´t own one. The ones I had were decluttered when they became decidedly too big after condensing off a good part of excess weight, and the ones offered at the beginning of winter were too flimsily made to even think about them as a possible solution.
Enter the end-of-season sales. Fifty percent off all winter jackets. And they do have some jackets that are a lot better than the ones in December.
Then again, it´s February already, which means that the big cold will, probably, last no more than two months at the most before it gets warm enough to return to wearing my woolen coats.
And by the time winter returns, I fully intend to have gone on condensing myself by at least another dress size. More, if possible. Were I to buy myself a jacket now, it would probably be too big by next winter (at least I hope so), so, by buying now, I´d cheat myself out of the experience of buying a jacket in a smaller size and wear it next winter.
Then again, I might have to pay retail for next year´s jacket if I were to need it before it gets downmarked.
It´s d..d if you do and d...d if you don´t.
Or is it? Even if that fur parka is so darn inconvenient, it´s what I have now, and won´t have to pay for, either. So, from a point of frugality, the best solution would be to keep using it and stop whining about how uncomfortable it is. And practice a little gratitude considering that without that thing, I´d be a lot colder this winter.
Besides, I´d be able to use a really warm down jacket for maybe one or two months before it gets too warm to wear it. And that is a timespan during which I can stand the inconvenience of wearing that fur parka.
And for the next winter,  I can always reconsider buying a down jacket.
Being in the process of recondensing myself means not knowing what size I´ll need next winter. Thus, it would be stupid to buy now.
For everyone who intends to be the same size next winter, there may be some real occasions to be had right now. But that´s something I don´t intend, so, I´ll wait and see which size I have to buy by next winter. And save myself from buying another garment that would end up on the decluttering stash barely worn.
After all, I have resolved that I would only buy the absolute necessities in garments while still in transition to my goal weight. Everything else would mean throwing out money. Even at half price.


Julia

The sum of little things

Buying just one thing at a dime-and-dollar store. Eating just one piece of candy. Bringing home just one item.
For most of us, these would be filed under "small indulgences". The things we do "because we deserve it". The things that "cost just a little bit".
But these are also the things that get us into trouble, if repeated more than rarely. For my money, it makes no difference if I spend one dollar ten times, or spend ten dollars at once. For my weight, there´s in the long run no difference between a once-a-day-one-piece chocolate habit or eating a whole bar once a week. For the fight against clutter, there´s no difference between bringing home one small item at a time daily or bringing home seven once a week.
Still, the threshold to cross before doing something that is against our better interests is a lot lower when we perceive the transgression as a small one. And it gets even lower when it´s coupled with a feeling of entitlement.
Which is exactly what a lot of stores prey on. One of the most dangerous shopping traps for me, in the past, was a chain of stores that, originally, sold just freshly-roasted coffee. And then the owners had the idea of including other merchandise, namely, household stuff. They started selling coffee drinking paraphernalia first, as in coffee machines and cups, and graduated to garments, tools, kitchen stuff  and decorative items. The kicker being that they have a different set of merchandise every week, so, there is the added pressure on the customer because the item may be out of stock the next time they come by.
I used to drop by there every week, not for coffee, but for those pretty things they had besides coffee. Most of the time, I came back with something that, the day before, I didn´t even know existed. so, definitely not something off any long-time wish list. And those somethings added up, financially as well as clutter-wise.
Had I wished so, I might have gotten myself a complete set of table decorations every year for Easter or Christmas, or a new set of garden tools every spring, never mind that last year´s ones were still good and stored away somewhere.
The realization that there was a regular return of themes in their merchandise helped me to see the most recent set of merchandise as just another variation on a theme they had had already, and, if I had bought the items the first time they came around, I didn´t need another edition just because this time they were yellow and the first time they had been red.
What also helped me was adding up the total cost of those small indulgences and measuring it against the cost of those items on my all-time wish list that I had always put on the back burner because they were so expensive. Turned out that, if I had restrained myself from grabbing the small stuff, there might have been enough money saved to go for some of the big-ticket items.
Which is why I have stopped indulging myself with little things. They usually end up cluttering my flat anyway, the pleasure to be had from them is mostly short-lived, and buying them keeps me from achieving the bigger goals I have for my flat and my lifestyle. I can appreciate that something looks pretty, but I don´t have to buy it to enjoy it, especially not if I already own something to do that item´s job.
The number of those items that see regular use is rather small, anyway. So, I still look at their merchandise when passing that particular shop, but I rarely even enter to see what they have inside, and even more rarely do I buy something. Actually, I only buy something there if it is something I have had on my wish list for a while. The last thing I bought from there was a pair of chef´s pincers for turning around bacon when frying it. That was something I had seen in a cookware shop and refrained from buying at the time because they were pretty expensive, so, when I saw a similar item at a highly reduced price at the coffee sellers´, I took it home and am using it daily when preparing our bacon-and-eggs breakfast.
Then again, in my book, something that sees daily use is not exactly an indulgence, even if I could get around using a different instrument for the job ( I used to turn the bacon with a fork).
But the number of things I would use daily is small when compared to that of things I used to bring home just because they were pretty.
Knowing the difference keeps a lot of clutter out of my home and a lot of cash in my pocket.


Julia

Learned reflexes

Just how much of what we buy do we really need?
I have, in the last months, had occasion to ponder that more than once.
As I am working smack in the middle of town, going out during lunch break means walking right through the busiest shopping streets hereabouts.
Of course, I don´t walk past there with my eyes closed, so, I cannot help but notice the shops and their decorated windows. And if it´s raining and I still want to stretch my legs a bit, I enter the bigger shops and do some walking around in there.
I usually do not even bring my wallet along any more for those walks, and that made me realize something that I would, in olden days, not have noticed.
Namely, how often I see something that seems to say "buy me".
In the old days, I would not have thought twice about it. If it said "buy me" and I had the cash on me to buy it- or the credit cards- I bought it.
There was hardly a day going by when I did not carry home some plastic bag filled with something bought on that day, starting out with things like scented soaps, or perfumes, or makeup, to aromatized loose teas, or music cds, or decorations. I ended up with a full drawer of makeup that spoiled faster than I could use it up, several shelves full of cds I don´t have time to listen to, and more tchotchkes and bric-a-brac than I could ever put on display in my household.
I also ended up renting a bigger apartment to put the stuff in.
The bigger apartment part did come in handy when DH moved in with me, so I´m not complaining there, but still the continuous influx of mostly small items without a corresponding amount leaving the flat again made me reach a point where it was virtually impossible to keep the place tidy, simply because most of the items did not have a place to put them away.
Fast forward to now.
Several years of continuous decluttering have, by now, reduced the amount of stuff to the point where everything can, theoretically, be put away somewhere.
I still have some cupboards that require ingenious stacking methods to put everything in, and some drawers that are a bit hard to close, but hey- I never said I was perfect, did I? And our cellar compartment still houses several plastic boxes of china and kitchen utensils I´m not yet ready to toss.
But apart that, I have whittled my possessions down to a point where they have become manageable again.
It was hard work to get there, and I do not want to go back to where I was. So, I have installed an ironclad rule. No item may enter our flat of which we cannot in advance tell where it will live.
The second rule is no shopping for recreational purposes. I can, of course, look all I want. But I must not buy.
That is where I suddenly realized how often I had the impulse to buy something. Having no cash or cards on me meant not being able to follow that impulse. So, I left the shop without the item.
The interesting thing was that I rarely even felt the need to go back to that shop to get the item at a later point.
Imagine that- the very things that I would, before, have dragged home without a second thought to clutter up my flat are now not even interesting enough to come back for them. Or, on having time to think about them, I remember I already have such an item and do not need a duplicate. So, no new teapot if I already have five of them ( for different sorts of tea ;) )and no new coffee mug, however funny, either unless I am ready to toss one of those I already own.
And no freebies either.
The desire to acquire is something that sometimes makes it difficult to resist new stuff knocking at your door.
Case in point, several years ago my parents had to dismantle the household of a very dear cousin after her death. Now, this cousin had, all her life, liked to invite people over, and she had owned several twelve-settings sets of expensive china, crystal glasses and cutlery for the purpose.
My father offered me one of the china sets. I did hesitate at first, because I genuinely liked the former owner and it was part of her inheritance, after all. But then, I don´t do invitations, and the beautiful china would, for us, have become just another white elephant  to store and care for, a source of guilt because I don´t do the society life my parents had brought me up for.
So, I declined. But I declined with a heavy heart. I also declined most of her kitchen utensils that my father tried to give me, apart one pot, one small ladle and an ingenious twist-off-cap opener I had always coveted.
These things I have in my kitchen, I love them, use them often, and they remind me of Cousin Mary every time I use them.
And the others things have, instead of saddling me with the problem of how to store them, gone on to a better life with another relative who will actually use them regularly.

So, it´s not about saving money. That is just a side effect. It is about defending our precious space from the influx of stuff that mindlessly acquiring things creates, and about consciously deciding what we want in our lives.

Because in the end, it´s not the one who dies with the most toys who wins, but the one who got to play the most. And the number of items one has acquired over a lifetime may just end up as a measure of the amount of work dumped on the people who will have to dismantle one´s household someday.

Think about that for a moment.
Someday you will die. Life has been found to have a 100 percent lethal outcome in laboratory mice, and the findings are applicable to humans, too.
And then somebody will have to go through your belongings.
Think of that somebody.
Did you just catch yourself pitying him? Or even think "serves him right"?

And now think about how much of your own life you spend on your belongings. Acquisition, storage, care.
Count the time you have to work for your stuff, the time you have to take care of it, once acquired.
Don´t forget to think about what else you could have done with that time, with that money. Think about places you could afford to see, experiences and memories you could have.
For people who have children, there´s also the intention of leaving something good for them. But demographics have changed, just as the quality of merchandise has changed.
In the olden days, things were made to last for several generations, handed down from father to son or mother to daughter. I, too, have some items that did once belong to my great-grandmother.
But today, most things do not even come with a one-lifetime warranty. Mass-produced goods are not supposed to outlive their owners. And- which is in and of itself a good thing- people get to live a lot longer than they used to.
And that means that, if parents live to be eighty or ninety years, their children will have to build a complete household from scratch without relying on any heirlooms coming their way.
So, without any bad intention, they will in all probability not have any use for most of the things they find in their late parents´ homes, just because they had to acquire what they needed to live long ago.
Thus, acquiring things in the hope of passing them down to offspring someday does, in most cases, not make any sense.
For those of us who do not have any offspring, the question never even comes up.

So what do you want to do? Live your life, which means having experiences and building memories, or spend it on stuff?

To me, that is not a question. But I know that those acquisition reflexes die hard, and I must always be on guard against stuff taking over more of my life than I care to miss.



Julia

Giving up giving in

...to the lure of even more stuff: It´s a common theme in minimalist blogs to try and have things like a "no-spend-month" or a "shopping fast".

Today being the first day of lent, the christian fasting period,  has started me musing about what such a shopping fast really entails.

The common denominator of such endeavours is that people decide to curb all and any unnecessary spending for a set period of time.
And the difficult part is finding out what this little word "unnecessary" means, and then applying it to the decision of whether the thing before you, under that definition, could and should be bought.

A dictionary-style definition would run something like "not needed". Which begs the same question- what do we need?
Or, what do we not need?

There is no general rule for that, as far as the possession of things as such is concerned. Every person needs different things according to their lifestyle and personal preferences.
But.
No matter what your lifestyle is, no matter your preferences, the list of possessions you need to accomodate them is, by definition, a finite one.
There will be a point where you already own everything you really need.

And this point- unless you have just moved out from home, moved to a different climate, lost or gained a lot of weight or sustained another life-changing cataclysm-    has, for most of us, been reached 

now. 


How can I be so certain of that? Well, you are here and alive, aren´t you? And whatever it is you like to do, you are (hopefully) doing it already. You have been eating, dressing yourself, inhabiting wherever your digs are, and you have managed to get around to wherever you really needed  to go.
So, in the past you have obviously had what was absolutely needed then.

I am, of course, not talking about people who are destitute or homeless. I´m talking about those of us who could buy ourselves even more stuff, those for whom a spending fast makes sense at all. There is a lot of misery on this planet, and I am certainly not meaning to belittle those who suffer from it.

And I don´t miss out on the fact that some things need to be replaced regularly when worn out or broken, either. Or that some things simply get used up, and replacing them is a necessity.

But apart from these, you probably own all the necessary things for living your life.

Think of that for a moment.
All the necessary things.

And there´s the answer to what is, strictly, unnecessary.
Everything that does not replace something worn out, broken, or used up.

Now, I am not saying that you can´t sometimes improve on what you already have. I do that, too.  But then I have to decide what to do with the old stuff. If I decide to keep it, or if I decide to not decide what to do with it (which also means I´ll keep it), the result is clutter. Stuff I don´t use and, because I have a better replacement, don´t need any more.

The fight against clutter, thus, is a double one.
What goes in, and what comes out.
It´s exactly the same thing as with weight loss. You´ll never get ahead with cleaning up your life or your body as long as you don´t control what you let into them.

And that´s what fasting is about. Asking yourself what you want to allow into your body, into your life, and then making a conscious decision.

Isn´t it interesting that a lot of religions know periods of ritualized fasting? Most of those that do were founded a long time before our age of abundance and overabundance, by people who probably would never have imagined that human beings could live in an environment where there is practically no scarcity. When they imagined such a place they called it paradise.
So, by their standards, we are already living in paradise, at least where the material things are concerned.

Can you imagine a cluttered paradise? Probably not.

I can´t, either.
And that´s why a no-spend month is such a good idea. Find out what you really need, and buy only that.

Maybe you`ll even have something left to give to those who do not have everything they need.


Julia