40 Bags in 40 Days: Days 7 and 8

I did not get a blog post up yesterday because...um...I don't actually know why.  But I did make progress!

Thursday's area was our entryway.  Like the dining room table, it had just become a catchall, the place for crap that didn't have a better "home,"as it were.  We kept meaning to get an actual piece of furniture for that area, something with hanging hooks for our keys, maybe a slot for outgoing mail, but never actually did, so we just kind of made do with the banister and floor.  All of that stuff is now either put away, recycled, or tossed.  It's really incredible how freeing it is to get rid of things.  I was holding onto a journal from *middle school* that I used for daily writing assignments, and yes, they were kind of fun to look through.  Apparently one of the assignments was "Do you think O.J. Simpson was guilty?" and another was "What are your thoughts on abortion?"  Definitely some sophisticated subject matter, but surprise surprise, my opinions haven't changed much.  So did I really need to keep those?  Nope!  Why were they on my banister?  No idea!

Entryway before:

Entryway after:

When Eamon got home he said the house was looking "noticeably cleaner."  Yay!!

Friday's task was to go through my cell phone and pare down the photographs.  You can imagine how many pictures I've taken since Bug was born, but really, some of them are fuzzy, or the lighting is bad, and I have to be judicious about which ones are worth keeping.  I didn't get through all of them, but I made some progress.  What I really need to do (maybe tomorrow) is hook up the phone to my computer and make sure to transfer over all of the really good ones, and upload them to our cloud storage that Eamon set up.  It would really be a shame to put that off and then drop the phone in the toilet or something.  Which is totally something I would do, because I'm the world's biggest klutz.

40 Bags in 40 Days: Day 6

I'm really proud of myself for staying with this for almost a week!!  I have a really bad habit of starting big projects and not seeing them through, and I'm determined to keep up the good work.

Yesterday I turned my attention to our junk drawer.  Everyone has one, right?  And it's not necessarily all junk, but if the junk and the useful stuff are so entangled and intermingled that you can't find the useful stuff when you need it, it might as well all be junk!  Aside from throwing away fistfuls of twist-ties and organizing batteries into "charged" and "not charged" (we only use rechargeable batteries in this house) and things like that, there was one task in particular that really needed to be done.  You see, my husband works on a submarine, and one night he came home with about 60 pens and markers - because "they were just going to throw them out and pens are always useful."  Well, yes, pens are useful if they have INK.  Last night  I tested each and every single one and threw away 31...count 'em...31 pens!  That was a very good feeling.  And we have no shortage of pens even after all that - you can see the ones that survived the purge in the "after" picture!

  Before:

After:

40 Bags in 40 Days: Day 5

Well, I finished up the "Fun Stuff" file!  It lived up to its name - there was definitely some fun stuff in there!   Also a bunch of junk.  I really have no idea why I felt the need to hang on to some of that stuff.

One file in particular really needed to go away.  I had a pretty toxic landlord situation in Hawai'i, and after a really bad dispute between us, I sat down and wrote him a nasty e-mail in the heat of the moment, and before hitting "send" I just saved it to my computer.  I guess I wanted to have it to read later so I could get my blood boiling all over again??  I even labeled it "Andy vitriol" because that's all it was - just a string of insults and spite without much purpose.  Was it satisfying to bang on the keyboard as I typed it?  Sure.  Was it helpful to my well-being to keep it after all this time?  My goodness, no.  So I deleted it.  I didn't even open it again to read it before sending it to the recycle bin.  Does it mean I've forgotten what happened, or that it won't make me angry if I think about it again later on?  Of course not.  But it's a symbolic throwing away of the digital "baggage" associated with the whole drama, and that really matters to me.

A bunch of other random crap also went the way of the dodo, and I added some new sub-folders to organize what I decided to keep, like some really hilarious attempts at poetry from college and high school - didn't we all think we were so profound back then??  

40 Bags in 40 Days: Day 4

Yesterday I dove into the "Fun Stuff" file on my computer - it's really kind of amazing how many random Word documents I had just been holding onto, with very little justification.  I didn't finish the job, but the file was certainly much leaner by the time I called it quits for the night.  It was so easy to get distracted - I'd open files because the file name didn't actually give me much information, and then get distracted reminiscing about trips taken many years ago, crazy college antics, my own perceived poetic abilities (or lack thereof)...you name it, it was in there.

The file needs at least another half-hour or so of concerted work, so I will probably just continue it tomorrow and then do two straight days of "real stuff" decluttering.  I'm eyeing my junk drawer, my car, and the piles of clean laundry that are all over the floor of the bedroom.  The problem with the bedroom is that my best shot at a long enough stretch of time to get anything real done is when the baby is asleep, but...you guessed it, she sleeps in the bedroom!  So I might just have to put her down for a nap, wait until she's *really* out cold, and then sneak back in and work all stealthy-like.  We'll see how that goes!

40 Bags in 40 Days: Day 3

Because this challenge is designed to coincide with Lent, Sundays are a day off (love that!)  So even though I started a day late, I'm still giving myself Sundays as a break from both decluttering and blogging about decluttering :-)

Here's the area I tackled on Saturday:  It's the corner of our kitchen right near the sink, and because both my husband and I hate doing dishes by hand as well as putting away dishes, you can imagine how easily and quickly the drying rack fills up.  There was also just a lot of stuff piled and smooshed into that corner, and the spice rack needed attention.

Before:

After:

I didn't have a "bag" per se of stuff when I was done, but I had consolidated some of the spices (there were two containers half-full of stick cinnamon, two of ground ginger, that sort of thing), emptied the drying rack, found homes in the cupboard below for a few large storage containers, and just generally tidied.  I'm finding a lot of motivation from folks who post to the Facebook group with their before and after pictures - but mine are really inspiring too!!

40 Bags in 40 Days: Day 2

This will be a fairly short post, but first of all, let me just say that I really want to stick with this.  It needs to happen really badly and I know that I will feel great when it's over.  I'm just putting that out there to the universe as a motivation.  I might have to come back and read this paragraph every now and then!

Yesterday's accomplishment was the weeding of my e-mail inbox.  I'm pretty good about archiving as I go, but there were some really old messages in there that I had been meaning to deal with and/or respond to, but for one reason or another never did.  I kept them in my inbox in the faint hope that SOMEDAY I would follow through, and someday finally came in the form of yesterday :-)  I can't in all honesty say that I took care of every piece of correspondence, but I did cut my inbox down from 50+ to about 20, which is a really good start, and going forward, I am hereby pledging to do a better job of staying on top of my e-mails.  By which I mean:

1) making e-mails from friends and family my highest priority, and responding to them more promptly.  Yes, I have a baby now, but I do check fairly regularly, and it's just courteous and the right thing to do
2) cutting down on the number of activism lists to which I am subscribed so that I'm not faced with a bazillion requests to sign petitions every day (let's face it, some causes are worth it, but come ON, you sign one and the next day you get thirty more)
3) unsubscribing from retail money suckers newsletters; not only do I really not need the temptation, this will simply whittle down the barrage of e-mails coming in to begin with

I have not yet done today's declutter; confession, I haven't yet decided what today's declutter will be.  But the Bug is down for the night (fingers crossed), so I'm going to eat some dinner and then get going on...a pile of stuff somewhere in the house!  Yay for non-specificity!

Er...um...hi

I like having a blog, I really do.  When I was living in Hawai'i on my own it was a great way to write down the things I wanted to be sure to remember from my time there and compile some of my photographs of the scenery, flora and fauna.  But as you can see, after I moved to the Washington and reunited with Eamon, the blog just kind of fell by the wayside.  It's kind of hard to believe that nearly two years have gone by since the last time I posted here.  I had a household to unpack, I was instantly caught up in rehearsals for "Fiddler" (which turned out to be just the thing, with Eamon gone on a really long deployment - a large cast is a terrific instant social circle!) and I was job-hunting to boot!  Also, I've managed to use Facebook for a lot of the everyday update type stuff that people tend to blog about, and I never felt the need to document my sewing projects step-by-step (the way lots of costumers keep online "dress diaries") on my blog.  I did post some "in-progress" pictures, but largely I just put the finished items on Facebook and/or my Pinterest page.  But I never just completely shut down the blog, mostly because it never occurred to me, and also because I figured maybe I would eventually want to use it for costuming stuff or whatever.

I won't worry about giving the rundown of the past two years here, because I generally direct people to this blog from Facebook, so anyone with whom I'm already friends there knows about all the big stuff like the birth of my daughter (referred to herein affectionately as "Bug").  Incidentally, she is yet another reason the blog has been silent - I know, I know, some people keep mommy blogs, but I am not one of those people!

HOWEVER!

I think I may have found something to blog, at least for a little while, and then maybe the blog will sink back into oblivion or I'll figure out another use for it.  There's this 40 Bags in 40 Days challenge that a friend posted about on Facebook, and goodness knows I need to declutter!  I guess it's designed to line up with Lent - which I don't observe, since I'm not religious in any way, but I do know Wednesday was the first day, so I'm already behind ;-)  It's okay though because there's a printable sheet for keeping track that doesn't have specific dates on it, so you can start whenever.

Here's a picture of the area I decluttered yesterday (Thursday).  I feel bad because my wonderful friend Diana came to visit in late November of last year so she could meet our little Bug, and one of the things she helped with while she was here was a declutter of this very table.  I had every intention of keeping it clear, and obviously that didn't happen.  But I must set aside guilt and simply dive in, and hope that this time I do a better job of maintaining a tidy surface.

So yeah, pretty messy.  Here's the "after"!

I did it!!  All right, so the things that were hanging off the chairs in the "before" shot are still hanging off the chairs.  Those are all the various baby-carrying contraptions we have collected and used, some more than others - there's a sling, an Ergo, a Moby wrap, and on a chair outside the frame there's even a Snugli (plus my purse and diaper bag, which is now also my purse).  I didn't even factor them into my declutter since it was really the surface of the table that needed clearing, but some of them could probably get stored away for now - most of the time these days when Bug isn't sleeping, we just carry her around or set her in one of her bouncy seats if we need both hands.

The bag on the table is my First Bag, and everything in it went to the recycling bin (yay!).  The other stuff mainly just needed to be given a home, and I think I did a pretty good job of finding places that all of it can live.  Not perfect, but at least we have a dining room table again!    

I haven't done today's declutter yet, and it's already getting on towards bedtime, but there's a suggestion on the challenge website that you can include non-physical spaces in this process, such as e-mail inboxes and computer files.  So, I will do a physical area on the odd days and a digital area on the even days, because I think that will help keep me motivated - changing it up is more appealing to me than looking forward to several days in a row of decluttering actual stuff.  Oh, and it's looking like I'll put up a blog post each day about the previous day's accomplishment ;-)

Stick with me and keep me honest!