We're moved in (well, sort of, kind of)

It happened.  The move that is.  We packed up our belongings and hauled them 964.4 miles (door to door) from Florida to Ohio.  The sixteen foot truck contained possessions for four humans and four cats. It was a very challenging day, especially since we had originally planned it to be a two day trip. One hour into the trip Jack (our long haired Maine coon) decided that traveling was not for him and had a, well, we will say it made the rest of the trip offensively odoriferous. And it meant that the first thing we had to do before letting him free in the house was give him a bath.  I still have wounds from where he decided to stick his fangs into my arm.

When I decided to do "living with less" I hadn't quite banked on not having furniture.  We only moved our beds, one dresser, my sewing machine table (the one that holds the sewing machine not the one I would use to cut fabric on), and the television stand.  No chairs, no tables, no couches, or dressers other than the one mentioned.  Our intention is to buy new here.  Or gently used (which would be nice considering the price of furniture).  We have been here just over a week and we are still using the folding chairs and tables borrowed from the spouse's work.  It is functional, but certainly not comfortable.  You can't flop in a folding chair.  You can't curl up in a folding chair (unless you are under the age of four and we are all beyond that).  You can't lounge in a folding chair.  You can simply sit.  And sitting for more than an hour is uncomfortable.

Herein lies the problem.  I want nice flowing lines in soft colors that have cool fabrics (think cotton or linen) and what we keep finding are overstuffed fluffy things in browns.  I don't want heavy dark colors, but the only places we can find lighter colors tend to be places that are ridiculously expensive.  I guess only designers use pretty colors and the furniture made for people who don't want to spend $2500 on a sofa are relegated to brown, black, black-brown, olive green or some weird shade that may have a blue hue to it, but really looks quite dullish gray green.  Ick.  What I am afraid is going to happen is that I am going to become so uncomfortable sitting in these (explicative explicative explicative) folding chairs that I will settle for something that is neither beautiful or what I want.

And let's talk about clothes.  I have no dresser or chest of drawers.  That means some of my clothes are still sitting in boxes.  I have most of my clothes hanging in the wardrobe that came with the house, but everything else (underwear, t-shirts, socks, pajamas) are still in boxes and poor spouse hasn't even gotten to hang up his clothes yet.  I keep thinking I am going to take pity on him and do it for him, but then I change my mind and think he should to it himself.  He is so used to living out of a suitcase that he probably hasn't even thought about the fact that he has an entire closet all to himself (well, except the bottom of the closet where my shoes are neatly lined up on my shoe rack).  Each morning I become more agitated at not being able to easily find clothes to wear.  I'm so tired of digging through boxes to find things. 

In the organizing front, I have begun a routine that I hope I can continue doing.  I get up each morning and unload the dishes, start a load of laundry and do a quick tidy through.  I want to get to a point where each day has a specific area or task that I concentrate on.  For instance on Fridays I do all the sheets in the house and clean the bathroom.  I need to pull out my Organized Simplicity book and see what the author has as examples to get me started.  It is difficult adjusting to new routines and I'm not just talking about housework.  The garbage runs on a different day and the mail comes at a different time.  Sometimes I feel like I am walking around in a fog because things are so different here.  The plants are different, the landscape is different, the road signs are different (Ohio goes a little sign crazy warning you about everything from "hidden driveways" to "snow streets"), the stores are different, and brands in the stores are different.  The one thing I am thankful for is that my new knitting group meets on Mondays, which is the same.  But even my new knitting friends are a little different (in a good way).

Oh and if anyone has a good recipe for a cleaning product that will get an entire pan of Bourbon Chicken sauce off hard wood floors please let me know.  
 

Time to panic

Well, no, not really, but it feels that way.  Because of a deadline that the spouse has at work coupled with a staffing issue we have had to move our date up a few days for departure.  Which means that I have four fewer days to get things done.  My list is ever growing.  I would have thought that my list would get shorter as I got closer to exit date, but it just grows and grows.  I keep finding little things that need to get done such as finding a place to dispose of all the full sharps containers that the spouse was supposed to dispose of as he filled them but instead collected them.  Now I have something like 30 containers that need to be properly disposed.  There is a number I can call according to the state's website, but no one is answering yet this morning. 

The worst part of this moving process is getting rid of the cluttery things that are getting in the way of real packing.  For instance my desk has a broken tape dispenser (why?), an old hymnal (I'm not religious so again, why?), a bunch of cords, a painting I don't want and a set of books and some old work out holey socks.  And receipts from who knows what (or when).  Today's task is going to be tackling the old office area.  It's full of much of the same stuff that is on my desk.  It is going to be a long day and I can't put these things off any longer. 

I did promise that as I tried various cleaning techniques I would respond back.  This past week I have used two different natural cleaning techniques with remarkable success.  The first was a kitchen spray made from 4 oz. of white vinegar, the juice of one lemon and the rest of a 20 oz. bottle of water.  I poured it into an old spray bottle and it has worked quite well as a general kitchen spray.  Ass well as the Method kitchen spray I have been using but at a fraction of the cost.  The other thing I tried was a paste of baking soda and lemon juice on my flat top kitchen stove to clean it and it did a very good job.  It also smelled good, so that was a bonus.  I wish I had taken before, during and after pictures, but I forgot.  I've been pinning tons of these ideas on Pinterest.  That place is addictive, but I'm trying to limit my time on there as I just have so much to do.

I haven't forgotten about this blog, I just haven't had the time to sit down and pen out any coherent thoughts.  Keep checking back, though.  If I get a moment or two I might pipe in with something.  Until then know that I am just horridly busy. 

Minimizing in other ways

This is a thought that isn't new to me.  I seem to often forget, though, that when I start minimizing in one part of my life I find other parts where I would like to minimize as well.  For instance chemicals.  Specifically cleaning chemicals.  We tend to reach for the 409 or Soft Scrub because it is easy, convenient, and probably what we were raised doing.  My grandmother used to clean her entire house with vinegar, bleach, baking soda and Pine-Sol.  I don't ever remember having any fancy store bought chemical sprays. 

Another area where I really want to reduce chemicals in my life is in my food.  We always complain about how busy our lives are and that we don't have time to cook from scratch, but at what cost to our health?  And how much time does it really take to make pancakes or brownies or a cake from scratch?  I'm tired of eating "food" that has ingredients that I cannot pronounce because they are more chemical than vegetable (or animal for that matter). 

I've started a collection of cleaning ideas and recipes that I will be trying out to see which works the best.  We've already started with some and as we use them I will report back as to how well I like them.  I'll start you all off with brown mix.  We love brownies in our house and while we have made homemade brownies in the past we always tend to fall back on boxed mixes.  I came across this recipe and we gave it a go last week.  They turned out some very yummy brownies.  The instructions said to mix all the dry ingredients in a plastic zip bag and when you are ready add the wet ingredients and bake.  I may do that at some time, but I found that the recipe is so easy that one doesn't truly need to waste plastic bags to make brownies.  Just mix them up as you go.

Dry ingredients: 
1 c. sugar
1/2 c. flour
1/3 c. cocoa
1/4t. salt
1/4t. baking powder

(sift those together or just use a whisk to blend them well)

Wet ingredients:
2 eggs
1/2 c. vegetable oil
1 t. vanilla

Mix and bake at 350° for 20-25 minutes in an 8"x8" or 9"x9" pan. 

We did find the texture just a tad bit grainy from the sugar and we may reduce that amount next time and increase the flour content just a bit.  I'll let you know what I do and how they turn out.

Busy busy week

This past week has been filled with all sorts of different events.  On Tuesday I had my last shift at work in the children's department.  Oh how I will miss my kids.  The happy part was that I got to put up one last theme wall before I left.  I love putting together displays.  It's probably my second favorite thing to do. (The first being putting books into young readers' hands.)

There has been tons of packing this week.  Packing up a room also means that you find things that belong in other rooms, some of which have already been packed.  I decided to put a box in each room that I have already packed so that I can add things that I have found in other rooms.  Hopefully this will make my packing a bit easier overall since there will already be a waiting box for each room.  Another thing that I have found is that I am constantly overlooking some item and then am surprised when I realize I have forgotten to pack something.  Case in point:  my winter bathrobe.  I figured I would leave my summer bathrobe out as I do wear it.  I have two because in the winter I want a bathrobe that I can snuggle into.  I bought the biggest bathrobe I could find, too.  It's probably three sizes too big for me, but it was big enough to go all the way down to my feet and double cross my torso.  It's pink and fluffy and like wearing a Sunggie backwards.  In the summer I still want to cover up sometimes but the winter bathrobe is far too bulky and hot for summertime, so I have a thinner one made of cotton seersucker that my mother made me when I was pregnant with my first child.  Twenty-one years later that bathrobe is still hanging in there and in beautiful shape.  It's also pink.  I was surprised when I closed my bathroom door the other day and found bathrobes (mine and the spouse's) hanging there like they always were.  It's odd how familiar those things are that you don't even think about packing them.  It's one of the reasons Alfonso (my Kitchen Aide mixer for those of you just joining me) is still on the kitchen counter.  Same with the paper towel holder.

So far this week I have packed the former hobby area and organized all the photos.  OK, that's a lie.  They aren't organized, but they are all in boxes with all the negatives in another box (still in their envelopes and somewhat labelled) which will stay here.  I cleaned out the old pantry.  I packed up the teas and spices that I am taking with me.  And as far as spices go the only ones that got packed were those spices that I actually had duplicates of.  Most of them are being left behind and I will only replace when I actually need them.  I couldn't see the waste in buying new cumin in Ohio when I had four (yes 4) bottles here.  Same with poppy seeds and sesame seeds.  I'm hoping to be a bit more organized in my new home so that I'm not purchasing spices every time I turn around.  I have packed the music room.  Music room is synonymous with the phrase dumping ground.  It's that place in your home where everything gets dumped when you come home.  It's all been gone through now and packed or had the items from that room taken to their proper rooms.  That gave me some extra room to stack boxes. 

And speaking of extra room, Dan sent me a picture of the closet in one of the bedrooms.  I am SO in trouble.  There is no way that we are going to be able to share this dinky closet with the two of us, even if we both are doing Project 333.  I'm thinking that we are going to need to invest in a wardrobe.  Here's the closet (the stuff in and around the closet belongs to the current tenants.)



I still need to to through and pack up the Christmas ornaments, but want to go through those with my eldest daughter to see if there are things that she wants.  Also left on my agenda is packing towels, dishrags, aprons, and going through my desk that has accumulated things that I didn't want to deal with immediately.  So there is the Japanese sock from when I was a child, two CD-Roms with e-books on them, my Buddha board, a "stamp-a-ma-jig" and various papers, pins, and campaign memorabilia.  I still have three and a half weeks and packing is becoming more difficult as I'm down to the onsie-twosies and forgotten bits or things that just can't be packed quite yet (like clothes I still need and chargers to all our miscellaneous electronics that we use on a daily bases). 

And the decluttering is continuing as well.  I have taken two car loads of unneeded, unloved, unwanted household things to thrift stores this week and my front hallway stacked yet again with boxes of things to go.  I'm hoping to make a run by there today so I can start fresh this next week.  I'm amazed at how much I have accumulated in the past nine years living in this house.  Things I bought that I have no idea as to why I bought them in the first place.  Things given to me as gifts that I felt too guilty to get rid of even though I didn't need/want/love them.  I still have moments where I am putting something in the donation pile that I think, "Oh, so-and-so gave this to me for my fortieth birthday."  When I find myself in moments like that I take a breath and ask myself if I truly need/want/love it.  If the answer is no then out it goes. 

Even though my packing is winding down, I still have so much to learn about minimizing my life.  This is only step one in the journey.  One very small baby step at that.  Important, but still small.  Hopefully by blogging about this experiment it will keep me going on my track to fewer but more cherished and used things.

Of pictures and picture albums

Today's thoughts have been on pictures and picture albums.  Remember 35mm film?  You took pictures, carried the finished roll to the drugstore, had them developed and then took home that magical little envelope full of highly prized pictures of your trip to Disney, or the kids playing in the backyard, or birthday celebrations, or stupid things you cat did (half of which are blurry pictures as your cat is not a willing participant in the picture taking process). But they were expensive and you really had to think about taking them because every picture had quite a bit of cost associated with them.  Now pictures are almost a dime a dozen.  You can take hundreds of pictures with your phone or digital camera.  You can now select which pictures (if any) you decide to print. 

And then there are the scrapbooks or photo albums into which you carefully (or haphazardly) put them.  You might spend hours creating one page that has three pictures on it, carefully cutting out half-inch letters and meticulously gluing them with acid free permanent glue (which you later find out isn't living up to the 200 year archival stickiness that the package said it would).  You have striven to make masterpieces of pictures of your child's first steps with witty sayings such as "One Small Step for Mankind" or philosophical "A Journey Begins with the First Step." 

I have boxes and boxes of these kinds of things.  I have scrapbooks that haven't been worked on in four years.  I have pictures that date back to my childhood that I truly need to rescue from the horrible acid-laced "magnetic" albums from the 70's.  I have files of (mostly unorganized) pictures of my children from in utero to around 2008 or 2009.  Then we got a digital camera.  And then phones on our cameras.  So we have thousands of picture files on several different computers.  I don't think I have printed a picture other than one or two to frame (such as the picture I have of my kids on the beach the week before the BP oil spill in 2010) since 2009. 

Part of me wants to take those pictures and albums with me and dedicate a time each week to making order of them and weeding out pictures and putting them properly into some sort of album, even if just a binder with sleeves) so that they can be enjoyed.  The other part says, "Why bother?"  I'm trying to come to a happy medium with both of these voices.  I want to bother because those are records of my children's lives and I have this horrid fear that I may one day be like my grandmother and not remember.  I see my own mother starting to have memory issues.  What if I forget?  That would truly be sad.  I want them to be beautiful, but I first want to preserve them.  Neatly rather than in the jumble they currently are. 

Of course in the next couple years we will get to how I manage that.  For now they are going to be packed and taken with me.  And hopefully one day they will be a treasure rather than a burden.  Something I love rather than something I feel obligated to tote around the country with me. 

Releasing Things

Sometimes I wish that we could de-replicate things.  Like on Star Trek when one is finished with something or has no use of something you can simply take it to a cubby in your wall, stick it in, push a button and voila! It is turned into energy that will later be used to replicate something you need, say food or clothing or a nice ball of yarn.  There are times that I will start on a project and quit part way through.  Perhaps it isn't a conscious quitting.  Perhaps I got sidetracked by a crisis, a deadline for something else, or because I noticed and error and knew I had to stop right then or it would become a bigger error so I set it aside with all intention of going back and fixing it Later.  Then you find it weeks or months or even years later.  By now you have forgotten where you were in the process or what the mistake was an how you should go about fixing it.  Something inside you says, "You can't get rid of it because you have invested your time and energy into this project already."  You put it away again or you try to figure out where you were and what you need to do.

There are instances where I have fallen out of love with a project or an object or a somethingelseject.  Yet it is difficult to give up.  Case in point:  I have these two black lacquered jewelry boxes from Japan.  I got them when I lived there as a child.  They have pink striped silk interiors.  One has little metal tabs in the shape of sakura (cherry blossoms) and the other still functionally plays a traditional Japanese melody.  It's a pretty tinkling sound.  I treasure them, but I don't use them.  And, sadly, they too often go undusted.  I don't look at them often and there isn't any truly fond memory other than the short time I lived in Japan.  So why do I hang on to them.  They are going in the box of things I can't quite get rid of, but don't want to give up yet.  Hopefully, in a few years when we either move back or permanently settle in Ohio I will be able to more easily let those things go as they are no longer tied to me.

There is something very freeing about being able to say, "You no longer please me.  Be free and find someone who will."  I'm having to get over the idea that I have wasted money in purchasing something I haven't used or no long want.  My children are really much better at that than I am.  There are times, though, that I go to a thrift store and see all kinds of clap trap.  Odd coffee mugs from conferences, ugly Christmas sweaters from the 80's, a mish mash of half used balls of acrylic yarn.  When I try to imagine those things in my home I get a little queasy.  Maybe it is because I have some of those things anyway (save the Christmas sweaters) or maybe it is because I can see how they were a burden to someone else.  "I went to that conference.  I paid for that mug.  But ..."  Yeah.  It's just a mug.  And that is how I am trying to see the things in my house as Just Things.  Very little of it do I actually have any sentimentality.  So away it goes!

Thoughts on books

I learned to read when I was three.  I think it may have been a mistake, as far as minimalism goes, to allow a child to learn to read so early.  I grew up out in the country where there were no other little girls to play with.  I could only take so much playing with the rough and tumble boys in my neighborhood and most of the time they didn't want a girl, especially a prissy girl who talked about books and knitting all the time, hanging around with them.  Sadly, I was shot with a BB gun more times than I care to recount.  And then during ninth grade I was ill for quite some time and the only thing I had energy for was propped up in bed with my nose in a book.  Even holding a book was tiring sometimes.  I've been a librarian, a bookseller, a wife to someone who loves books almost as much as I do, and the mother of three children who have their own growing collections of beloved books. 

I have quite a collection of beloved books.  My first ever copy of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.  The Red Tent by Anita Diamant.  The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare.  To name a few.  When I first learned to read there was Junior Elf Book called Kate and Kitten which I adored.  Somewhere along the line my mother threw it out because it was "so worn."  I looked for years for that book.  I searched through yard sales, antique shops, rare book stores, online book dealers, and finally Amazon where I found a copy in decent condition.  I bought it.  Oddly, reading it when you are forty-seven years old is much different from reading it when you are three years old.  I found it quite juvenile and the writing was a bit belittling to children.  Also, the father in the story always had a pipe in his mouth, something you would not find in 2013, but was quite common in 1965 when the book was published.  But then this was a dime store book and cost a whopping 59¢.  (Just a note, I remember when the Berenstain Bears father used to smoke a pipe, but newer edition of those books have omitted the pipe.)  So while the book is not great work of literature, it does house fabulous memories for me.  Perhaps my love of this book had more to do with it being one of the first books I could actually read on my own rather than some great story.

There is also a classification of books that I call Sacred.  I'm not talking about Bibles, Korans, or Books of Shadows.  I'm talking about books that I feel should be revered because of their age, their information, their bindings, and their weight.  I have two such books in my collection.  One is Handbook of Heraldry By John E. Cussens.  It was published in 1893 and is still in gorgeous condition.  It looks like a book should look.  It has an olive fabric binding with gold lettering and detailing.  The heraldic roses that decorate this books are actually embossed and it still has the translucent onion skin sheets between print and plates.  The other book I have is called Forme of Cury.  The imprint that I have is from 1791.  It is a cookbook from the time of King Richard II (not to be confused with Richard III who was buried under a parking lot). 

This is what it says on the inside plate:

The
Forme of Cury,

A Roll
Of
Ancient English Cookery,
Compiled, about A.D. 1390, by the
Master-Cooks of King Richard II,
Presented afterwards to Queen Elizabeth,
by Edward Lord Stafford,
and now in the Possession of Gustavus Brander, Esq.
Illustrated with Notes,
And a copious Index, or Glossary.

 

My copy looks newer than my heraldry book and I absolutely love it.  I have also cooked some of the recipes from this book including "Gourdes in Pottage" and "bukkanade." Bukkanade is this sort of greyish stuff that looks like it was cooked during the Middle Ages and left out on the counter for six hundred years before serving.  But it tastes rather well.  In the whole medieval foods kind of way.  Actually medieval food mostly all tastes quite well because no matter when you lived if food didn't taste good people wouldn't eat it.  Some of the spices and combinations of ingredients are foreign to our twenty-first century palate, but they aren't bad.  It's not like eating old kimchi.  (I know, I'm going to get slammed for that one, but I just cannot stomach kimchi or haggis for that matter.) 

Then there are books that you feel indebted to keep.  The first editions of Harry Potter (books 1-7).  The book your friend wrote (which was good, truly).  The book you inadvertently stole from a library over twenty years ago (I didn't realize it got packed when we moved cross country and just found it a couple years ago).  And the books your children gnawed on as they learned to love books.  Some books will always be kept such as my collection of Winnie the Pooh books.  But others?  Do I really need to keep all the J. R. Ward Black Dagger Brotherhood books?  Will I really read them again?  Not to mention that I have them already on my Nook.  So why do I need a paper copy of them?  And what about the seven boxes of science fiction books?  Or the books that seemed interesting and were only half read?  I am quite sure I will never get around to finishing them.  There are too many books on my ever growing list of Must Reads to go back and finish a book that I was only halfheartedly reading while waiting for something better to come along.   And all the ARC's (Advanced Readers Copies) that I took home from work because they were free and the premise looked interesting and might be worth reading some day.  

Those are some of the things that I will need to keep in mind.  And hopefully, as I start digging through these boxes of books, I won't get distracted and start reading.  Which is why my collection never truly gets weeded.