Posts Tagged ‘decluttering’
Big Change
Things have changed dramatically from too dry and dusty to nicely soaked after two days of a mix of occasional rain and constant drizzle. It was just cool enough that Cyndie chose to put a rain cover on Mia, as she rarely receives a gracious welcome from the other horses who shelter under the overhang.
Since the horses were showing little interest in walking out into the rain to get a drink from the waterer, we provided some temporary buckets near each placemat. It’s interesting to see how often they choose to dip their snouts in the bucket while eating when it’s convenient. Has us thinking we should wet all their food, not just Swings’. She has been getting softened servings as the eldest mare because she has lost some teeth in her advanced years.
The muddy slurry of lime screenings is almost as annoying to navigate and poop-scoop as the overly dusty conditions. I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I didn’t have some complaint to make about the conditions. Hey, I’m just reporting what I see.
Cyndie made use of the inclement weather to take care of some overdue cleaning of stencils under the entry to the shop door while Asher and I stood watch, occasionally handing her something that I thought might work better for her task.
There wasn’t much else to do in the soaking wet conditions. I ended up doing some rudimentary sweeping of the concrete shop floor.
Yesterday, I resorted to watching college football on television while Cyndie ventured to Minneapolis to add all the clutter she had scrounged from our basement to the yard sale that our friends, Pam and John, hold annually.
The sun is making a re-appearance this morning, and all the growing things look really happy about the return of hydration.
In just a few days, we have experienced a big change. Here’s hoping we don’t need to swing to such extremes every time a new weather system takes hold. For today, we are blessed with a pretty reasonable balance. We will be sure to appreciate it for as long as it lasts.
Maybe the next weather complaint I come up with in the future will be about how perfect it has been for such a long, long time.
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Interesting Sightings
Cyndie’s dahlias continue to bloom with a photogenic appeal. I can’t resist capturing them in different light and at different stages of development.
I went with a little backlighting on this shot.
Yesterday afternoon, the clouds finally broke up enough to give us a sunny end of the day. It had rained over three-quarters of an inch overnight, and the day started out pretty wet.
I waited until after lunch to consider mowing. It was still a little damp in spots, but not wet enough to keep me from getting a handle on trimming the blades of grass that seem to be taking every advantage of what little moisture has been falling from the sky.
Most of the areas where the grass looked absolutely destroyed have made a decent recovery. I’m amazed at the resilience of plants.
When I returned to the house after mowing, I found Asher lounging on the garage apron and every door to Cyndie’s car wide open. In a heroic feat of decluttering, she was packing her car to its limit with items dredged from the basement for contribution to our friends’ yard sale in Minneapolis this weekend.
I hope all that stuff finds new use and is seen as a bargain by the hunters seeking deals.
Overall, it was a pretty normal day yesterday. Right up until I came upon this large hole in the ground.
Looking through it, I could see the sky.
How does that work?
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Mia Wins
Looks like Mia won that round. We awoke to a moderate blanket of snow covering most everything, with temperatures hovering in the upper 30s (F). Mia was a little wet, but not soaking, and showed no sign of being too cold.
I couldn’t help sensing a bit of cockiness in her attitude, but I suspect that is pure projection on my part. She adamantly demonstrated she did not want to be covered, and the weather ended up being much less severe than what I had expected.
Touché.
The other thing I didn’t expect yesterday was for the sky to clear so completely and the sunshine to make the snow disappear from everywhere but the shadows.
Wednesday is the day we roll our trash and recycling bins down to the end of the driveway, so I collected all the trash I could find in the house and barely came up with half a bag. With Cyndie out of town for the previous week, there hasn’t been much activity in the kitchen. I haven’t made any purchases of packaged products. Didn’t need to replace the furnace filter.
I don’t know what we usually produce for garbage in a week, but it’s rarely less than a couple of bags. I took it as an opportunity to seek out some worthy items lying around that deserved to be jettisoned. Might as well take advantage of the available space.
The thought crossed my mind that I should contact the trash hauler to seek a discount for being conscientious customers who strive to minimize what we put into the waste stream. Figuring they would be unlikely to humor me and honor such a request, I went the other direction, digging up odd miscellany to fill the bin and make the driver’s trip worthy.
I found an old, practically ancient bicycle helmet with styrofoam so long out of date it was not safe. I emptied the trash container in the shop and also the one in the barn.
Leaving the bin by the road, I had mixed feelings. The decluttering urge was rekindled and gave me a sense of satisfaction to be getting things tossed that don’t warrant being kept. At the same time, it did feel like a loss to be arbitrarily increasing trash that goes into the waste stream just because there was space in the bin.
It would sure help if the trash hauler charged less for those of us who hardly fill the bin.
This morning, I plan to offer Mia a chance to wear a rain sheet before the next round of predicted precipitation starts to fall later in the day. If she accepts, I’ll take it as a sign she understands the coming weather better than I do.
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Declutter Day
It was quick. It was easy. So quick and easy, in fact, that I almost forgot it was part of my day yesterday. There is another likely reason it slipped my mind: it happened at the crack of dawn. A recent acquaintance volunteered to come first thing in the morning to take my collection of accumulated metal scrap. As a thank you to him for doing so, I offered him my old Craftsman riding mower as well.
That became a 2-for-1 decluttering success for me. That mower has been sitting untouched in the shop garage for at least two years. The battery was dead, so I couldn’t start it for him, but we pushed it out of the garage and onto his trailer in a wonderful exclamation point of decluttering.
Taking advantage of finding myself in the decluttering mode, I also finally took action on an inconvenient piece of trash that has been sitting around for years, collecting pigeon shit in the hay shed.
This plastic bucket had a broken bottom but was too big to fit easily in our trash bin. It needed to be busted up into smaller pieces. That’s something that I never found myself wanting to do, so it just got moved around in the shed each time it was in the way of whatever we were doing.
After the scrap metal was easily dispatched, I used that momentum to snap 
that bucket into little pieces that fit into a garbage bag.
There is no valid reason why that couldn’t have happened the very day the bottom of that bucket broke in the first place.
The sun had just barely come up, and I had accomplished a day’s worth of rewarding feats. Then I completed manure management chores and headed to the house for breakfast. I watched the thrilling finish of Stage 16 of the Tour de France on Mont Ventoux, followed by raking, mowing, trimming, and more mowing.
Add in a little jaunt to Minneapolis for dinner with Rich and Gary, where we plotted a September bike adventure in South Dakota, and I found my mind had lost track of how my day had started.
The only thing missing was a nap that I would have enjoyed having somewhere in the middle of the afternoon.
Maybe I can make up for that today…
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Top Drawer
The top drawer of my dresser does not store any clothing items. If residential kitchens are known for having a household “junk” drawer, the first drawer in my dresser is my personal junk drawer. All too often, when I cover the flat top surface with too many things, and Cyndie wants the room cleaned like a hotel getting ready for new guests, it all gets shoved into that top drawer.
Yesterday, with the weather being rather unfriendly for outdoor activity, I took the bold step of pulling that drawer out of the dresser and unloading the entire contents onto our bed to be dealt with in one way or another. One of the reasons this task has been neglected for years is my knowledge that it wouldn’t be easy to know what to do with everything.
I also knew it would take more hours to complete than I wanted to dedicate to the project but I decided the best way to deal with that was to force the issue by dumping it all out and using our bed so I would be forced to finish what I started.
Did you know a lot of retail receipts have disappearing ink? I found several of the funky paper strip receipts that seemed worth keeping at the time weren’t even legible to know what was purchased. I found a very readable receipt for the chainsaw purchased in 2013. I actually do have a file in the den for what I call “long-term save receipts” where that should be filed.
It felt good to fill a bag of trash and one for recycling with stuff that was beyond their useful dates. When one enters ‘decluttering’ mode, one can easily part with things that were once deemed worth saving, and the momentum becomes a positive feedback loop.
For a person who never needed glasses until about my mid-forties, I found a surprising amount of eyewear had accumulated. I also uncovered no less than four digital pocket cameras, revealing the evolution of my camera hardware over the years.
I have charged all the batteries and verified basic function enough to allow me to look into ways to release these back out into the world for the purpose for which they were designed.
Is there a subset of the population that doesn’t have cell phone cameras? It’s probably small, which is why the cameras all ended up being stored in the drawer in the first place.
Around lunchtime, I wished to be done with the project but pushed on after a break and brought it to a close before the dinner hour arrived.
Topping off my satisfaction is the fact I moved no more than two small things from my top drawer to the kitchen junk drawer. I’ve got a bag of stuff to put back into circulation, a filled small bag of trash, a fair amount of recyclables, many odds and ends knick-knacks relocated to logical places, and the rest returned to the drawer with room to spare.
Special shout-out to Cyndie for her moral support and willingness to find new uses or storage locations for items that would have stumped me.
Here’s hoping I don’t allow the drawer to become overstuffed again anytime soon.
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Barely Noticed
We knew it was coming, so when snowflakes started to fly, we didn’t make much of a fuss over it. While Cyndie was in the middle of a phone conversation, I noticed her gesturing to direct my attention toward windows. The rain was changing over to sleety flakes.
Not a big deal, but it was enough that I decided to take a picture of the first snow of the season. Then, we got on with some rewarding indoor activities. I cleaned out some drawers of accumulated clothing and successfully took action on several things that have been stored for years and rarely worn anymore.
We were in the closet of winter gear, digging for coats to walk Asher and feed the horses in blowing rain and snow that was strikingly similar to Icelandic conditions. Cyndie decided to sort and give away worthy items discovered in there, and soon, we were on our way to earning a decluttering badge for the day.
The next time we looked out the window, we were surprised that we’d barely noticed how much the snow had intensified.
I thought it was still too warm for us to get any accumulation.
Alas, it was too warm for snow to last very long, and as fast as it arrived, it melted away again. It was a bit surprising to find we collected almost 2” of moisture in the rain gauge by the end of yesterday.
Like she often does, Cyndie found a way to squeeze in some baking between closet cleaning and crafting her latest secret art projects. She made a dozen small loaves of bread –six cranberry orange and six banana nut with chocolate bits.
The house smelled delicious when I woke up from an afternoon nap in the recliner.
Not a bad way to close out the month and usher in something that feels a bit more appropriate for November. Uncharacteristically, all my winter coat options are neatly organized and hanging in the freshly cleaned closet before I actually need to put them to use.
Mia got an early chance to wear her winter coat yesterday after Cyndie found her shivering excessively in the cold rain. Some days, I wish we could just bring Mia up to the house with Asher and us when the other horses are behaving like mean girls to her.
Swings stands under that overhang, warm and dry all day long, Light often by her side. Mix moves in and out a lot and rarely stays dry. Poor Mia barely sneaks her head under to eat bites of hay from a net bag, always ready to retreat if one of the other three decides to claim that space.
The precipitation moved away to the east last night, so all four horses probably headed out into the fields where Mia would be able to claim whatever space away from them she wanted.
We had the heat on and slept snuggly under warm blankets all night, barely noticing how far below freezing the temperature ultimately dropped.
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Heirloom Rehomed
After consulting with Julian W. Hays, I decided to check with the Pierce County Historical Association about their interest in having my great-grandfather’s Oshkosh steamer trunk. John Waters Hays (1860-1931) was eleven when his father, Stephen W. moved the family to Pierce County.
By the 1880 Census, John is listed in the Village of Morris in Stearns County, MN, as a boarder with the occupation of Painter at the age of 20. John most likely spent his teen years in Pierce County, so I think the PCHA collection of historic artifacts is a fitting place for the trunk to land once and for all.
John ultimately became Secretary-Treasurer of the International Typographical Union working out of the Indianapolis office. I assume this would have been his one piece of luggage for traveling during the years in that position.
After I used the trunk to store my clothes and valuables for decades, I passed it down to Julian. He used it for a while but then asked us to store it in our basement for him. I think the Historical Association is a better long-term place for the trunk to be kept.
I asked the Vice-President if she thought the PCHA would be interested in the precious family heirloom. She asked for photos and said she would share them with other officers and get back to me. The response came back a day later and the reaction was a unanimous “Yes!”
I drove it down to their office in Bay City on Tuesday afternoon. While I was filling out a donation form, one of the staff printed copies of articles about the school where John might have attended, based on the area where it appears they were living.
I have a good batch of reading to do. It’s not clear that I will find precise details about John during those years, but I can at least get a sense of what life might have been like for him.
Unfortunately, this will steal time away from my exploration of the spat between Joseph Sleeper and his wife, Abagail that led to dates in court.
So many ancestor stories to investigate, so little time.
Of course, the ultimate bonus for me out of this donation is the decluttering I accomplished in our basement. It provides a “win-win” and warms my heart that much more.
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Confusing Days
Don’t be confused. Today is Sunday. The solar eclipse will happen tomorrow. The championship game of the Women’s NCAA Basketball Tournament tips off today.
I don’t know why I’ve been so disoriented this morning, but I mixed these up at least twice before finally realizing where I was in time and space. Maybe it started yesterday. Cyndie and I huffed and puffed to drag the tangles of vines we’d collected up to a temporary staging area.
Before I attempt to craft an entryway arbor out of them, I will need to spread them out to see the individual twists and turns.
When I went in for lunch, Cyndie stayed outside to putter on other projects weighing on her mind. I got a text from her that she came upon a pile of vines we had missed.
Absentmindedness? I thought we had gotten them all.
It’s the kind of thing that leaves me thinking, “What else have I forgotten?”
My past is getting mixed up with the present recently because we have decided to “declutter” the remaining 100 record albums from our life-long combined collection. Long ago, I sold a majority of our library in the transition from vinyl to digital music, but I couldn’t part with the works of our most adored artists and a few one-of-a-kind records that would never be re-released.
After 45-50 years of holding most of these albums, we are ready to send them back into the world. Since our collection wouldn’t bring an impressive amount of money from buyers, Cyndie sought (and found!) an interested party who would appreciate them in a spirit commensurate with how we feel.
I’m not agreeing to this step cold turkey. For one particularly rare Eric Clapton album, I checked online for the availability of every song and then created a personal playlist in the exact order for my digital library. Attaching the artwork to the file gave me the comfort of a memory that will serve as a special link between albums of my youth and the digital library I’ve switched to as I age.
We’ve successfully saved our children from any guilt they might feel if they had to throw these away after Cyndie and I die.
Now, what else am I forgetting?
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Album Collection
If I were ever to venture from this moment to visit and romanticize a period of my history, I would gladly focus on the pinnacle of my young experience, and it would have everything to do with vinyl LP record albums of my most adored recording artists.
My parents and older siblings all had records and I became familiar with listening to the music and studying the intricacies of the covers and printed inner sleeves. I would guess I was in my early teens when my sister Linda offered to take me to a record store so I could pick out an album of my very own. My first.
I recall having no clue what to pick and walking up and down the aisle looking at too many choices of which I knew nothing. When I happened upon one in the front of a stack that had a brightly colored sticker touting a hit song, I decided that was the one I wanted. I’d heard the song on the radio, Black Sabbath’s “Ironman.”
When I grew old enough to know better, probably only a year or two later, I realized that choice was barely on the fringes of my genuine interests. Of course, interests evolve. I ventured in a few odd directions that seemed a stretch for me over time, but the constraints were more financial than musical tastes. Albums didn’t come cheap and it was prohibitive to buy an entire LP for interest in just one particular song.
If you didn’t own the record back in the day, you were at the mercy of a radio station to play a song you wanted to hear. Dropping my dollars on an album and bringing it home to break the seal of the clear plastic wrap was a momentous occasion. After setting the needle on the outside edge of side one, it was time to study the images and soak up every word on the jacket.
There is no experience like it today. Not when almost anything you can think of is available in a search of the internet.
The album art was almost as much of an experience as the quality of the music emanating from those vinyl grooves. Or is that, vinyl groove?
My first job after high school was selling records at the local mall. That broadened my exposure to new music and gave me the ability to bring home promotional albums I wouldn’t otherwise have bought.
When Cyndie and I got married, our similar but surprisingly rare number of duplicated albums merged to become one precious collection. That treasure was pared down drastically when digital music became the norm and I sold off all but one hundred gems that were either rare or meant enough to us we couldn’t part with them.
Yesterday, Cyndie pulled them out with a mind of continuing her momentum of purging possessions that we aren’t using. I’m considering pulling out my old turntable to find out if the belt on it is functional at maintaining 33 & 1/3 RPMs.
As much as I’d love to once again hear the music from old records I never digitized, I think I’m finding it even more pleasurable simply seeing the artistry of all those classic album covers another time.
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Big Purge
There has been a heroic level of de-cluttering going on around here lately. The credit goes to a burst of energy Cyndie experienced after doing some clean out of her mom’s house in preparation for a pending move. First, she inspired me to jettison a bunch of clothes I haven’t worn for years. Then, she brought me the contents of file cabinets that haven’t been cleaned out in a very long time.
I’d like to know who saved all this stuff in the first place.
The folder of long-term saved receipts was the most entertaining. I really need to remember to take the time to write what the receipt is for whenever that is not obvious. I was finding sales slips that had no clear identification of what the store or items purchased were. Why did we save those?
There were receipt slips with no date on them. Receipts for Apple products were printed with disappearing ink.
The types of purchases we intend to save records for a long time would be big-ticket items like furniture, appliances, or items of a high dollar amount. That’s why I would find Apple receipts. They’re not much good long-term if the print fades after two years.
Mixed into valid items in that file, I found silly, incidental low-dollar receipts. Better safe than sorry, we must be thinking at the time. Eight or ten years later, it makes for a laugh that we thought that way, originally.
We found our original marriage certificate tucked inside a folder of financial documents. Glad we haven’t needed to locate that document for decades. We never would have found it there.
After dinner last night, Cyndie sprung a surprise on me of some DVDs she discovered. Neither of us remembers getting old VHS tapes of home movies we’d recorded converted to digital, but there they were.
It went all the way back to 1986 when we made an attempt at recording movies that would chronicle the growth of our children, starting with 18-days-old Elysa up at the lake place. There were movies that neither of us remembers having watched back when they were originally recorded.
With a slice of warm from the oven blueberry/lemon pie for dessert last night, we viewed the first disc of three with Elysa’s name on it and then the first one of two with Julian’s. It was the obvious over-documentation of a firstborn and under-documentation of any child after the first one.
In classic kid form, at two years older than her little brother, Elysa was often seeking to be the center of focus when Mom and Dad were trying to record the boy.
We relived our kids’ first feedings of solid foods, first steps, and first birthdays. It had a significant ’80s vibe. There was a segment recorded at my mom’s small place for a Thanksgiving turkey dinner that included a glimpse of my vibrant (now-deceased) sister, Linda that amped up the already heavily nostalgic rush we were enjoying.
While in the middle of purging a lot of unneeded accumulation, we uncovered a treasure trove of memories we didn’t even know we had.
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