Breaking the Habit

Pssst...listen...I'm gonna let you in on a secret.  A little something I've learned during my first three months of downsizing.  Ready?  Here it is -- spending money is a habit.  Want to hear the best part? It's a habit that can be broken.  And I'm doing it.

I keep meticulous financial records so I can tell you that in the first three months of 2013 I've spent over $1,000 less than I did in the first three months of 2012 -- $1,048.76 less, to be precise.  And $1,579.26 less than the same period in 2011.  Told you I was meticulous.  (Sure, you call it anal, but I think we all have a little touch of OCD that crops up in some aspect of our lives.  Mine happens to be keeping precise records of where my money goes.)

But, see here's the problem -- spending money on stuff you need is, well, boring.  There's no joy in it, no momentary release of dopamine to put a smile on the face and a spring in the step.  Like a new pair of shoes will do.  For instance, in the last few months I've had to spend money on a new battery for my lawn mower, an accountant to tell me the obscene amount I owe for income tax, the dentist, vacuum cleaner bags, and flea pills for my dog.  I love my dog, but really.  Boring, boring, boring.

And the stuff I spent money on that I wanted to buy?  Music from ITunes; reloading my Starbucks card to enjoy coffee with friends; a stained glass class and some supplies.  Spot the trend?  All stuff to enhance my life.  'Cause what's life without music, friends and hobbies?

I've learned that spending money is like eating, therefore saving money is like dieting.  You have to be cognizant of what you're doing all the time.  And vigilant.  That's not always easy to do.  When I go several weeks without eating chocolate (okay, several days, who am I kidding, I've never gone weeks without eating chocolate) what ultimately ends up happening is I have just one little taste and then, well it's game over.  My biggest fear is that the same thing will happen to me with shopping.

I'll be in a mall.  I'll have my credit card out.  There will be a shoe sale.  And the smell of melting plastic will fill the air.   

Finding Balance

I'm an all or nothing kind of girl.  I took my very enjoyable recreational running habit and literally ran it into the ground.  A very painful two year case of plantar faceitis convinced me I can't run long distances every day.  If I eat one cookie, sure as heck I'm going to eat six.  I've even been known to knock off an entire bag of microwave popcorn in one sitting, blatantly ignoring the "two servings" clearly marked on the bag.  In my defence, however, I do put it into two bowls with no intention of the eating the second.  But what is that saying about intentions?  Something about the road to hell being paved with them?  

And so it is with this purge I'm doing.  It has become all consuming.  Writing my novel?  Back burner. Stained glass projects?  The other back burner.

Luckily there's light at the end of my purging tunnel.  Both my kitchen and main bathroom recently underwent total renovations so they were purged to the max at that time.  It remains a mystery to me how I could fill an entire garbage bag with junk just from under two bathroom sinks.  So now I'm down to just the rec room (aka the wreck room) and the basement closets.  Still no easy task.  It seems that stuff from all the other newly cleaned out rooms in the house has somehow managed to migrate into the rec room.  It's the final stop on the "does it stay or go" train.  The room where all the really hard decisions remain to be made.

But my April goal is to find balance again.  To carve out time for the wanna do's not just the haveta do's.  That's my intention anyway.  I'll just be sure to carry a fire extinguisher with me.  I've heard it can get a little hot in hell.

Parental Payback

In the end I couldn't do it.  I just couldn't get rid of the bits and pieces of my grandmother's dishes. Or the baby keepsakes.  Or my collection of salt and pepper shakers.  It just seemed, I don't know...harsh?  Disrespectful?  Unfeeling?  Wrong...it just seemed wrong.  So everything was lovingly packed back into boxes, the boxes carefully labelled and neatly stacked back on the storage room shelves.

But not to worry.  I have a plan.  And this is it -- when I die, my kid gets to deal with them.  It's brilliant really.  When she goes grumbling and cursing me into the storage room to clean out, she's going to unearth all this stuff she's never laid eyes on before.  She won't give a hoot in hell where the ugly dishes came from or why on earth her mother would have bothered to wrap and save a pair of alligator shaped salt and pepper shakers.  She'll be able to donate them or garage sale them without a single pang of guilt.  It's perfect.

Oh, maybe she'll feel some attachment to the stuff she grew up seeing around the house.  She'll box those things up and put them in her own storage room.  For her kid to deal with one day.

Parental payback.  The circle of life.  The circle of our stuff.

 

The Storage Room

By its very name you know it's going to be a bitch.

Bursting at the seams with all that stuff you only bring out occasionally, like Christmas lights and decorations.  And the stuff that only gets used once in a while, like camping gear and luggage.  But mostly it's stuff that doesn't stand a hope in hell of ever seeing the light of day again.  Those boxes of things that someone gave you or that once belonged to someone else...you know, the sentimental stuff.  How do you get rid of your grandmother's tea pot, even though you hate it?  So into a box in the storage room it goes.

I have to admit, I've stalled mid-way through the storage room purge.  Maybe it's due to the conjunctival eye infection I'm fighting off.  Maybe I'm just getting tired of it.  Either way, I'm feeling cranky and unmotivated.  Not a good way to be when there are boxes and their contents strewn everywhere.

And now that the days are getting longer and that elusive sun is starting to show his face around here a little more, do I really want to be stuck in the basement with my boxes?  The outside is calling to me.  It's saying, "time to dig and prune and mow and plant and rake and weed and wash windows...."

Hmmm, maybe the boxes aren't such a bad deal after all.

Photographs and Memories

I love it when someone sends me a photo via e-mail.  I can oooh and ahhh over the cute baby / puppy / kitten; be green with envy over the Eiffel Tower / Mickey Mouse / sandy beach; marvel at the beautiful bride / how much the kids have grown / the trophy win; be impressed with the new car / house / boat.  And then I can hit delete.  No storing them in a shoebox / drawer / shopping bag.

Not that I don't love a little stroll down memory lane.  Flipping through the pages of a well organized photo album.  With names and places.  But I've just spent many hours sifting through a loose assortment of photos stored in shoeboxes, drawers, and shopping bags.  Because -- and be honest -- when was the last time you actually made the effort to produce that scrapbook you swore you would? For me it was over 13 years ago after a trip to DisneyLand.  After that, it was shoeboxes all the way. So what to do with all those photos?

No longer know whose baby that was?...Gone.

Weddings where I was a guest but friend to neither bride nor groom?...Gone.

695 of the 700 photos of my sister's cats?...Gone.

Generic landscapes, blurry faces, ugly pics of self?...Gone, gone, and gone.

The real kicker comes when a relationship has ended.  What to do with those photos?  For me, life is too short to spend time with people who don't make me happy -- even if that person lives on only in photos.  It's hard to do, like erasing a part of my life.  But if they're something I never want to look at again?...Gone.

And just so you know I'm not a totally heartless bitch devoid of all sentiment -- there's still plenty of photos left in the shoebox.  Maybe one day, I'll put them into a scrapbook.

Maybe.

Student Chic

My daughter was recently accepted into a program at a college out of town, so starting in September she'll be living away from home for the first time.  We've been scavenging through the house for stuff to get her set up.  Good way for me to purge and a great life lesson for her:  you build a place with odds and ends and replace them as you can afford to.  Some of the best times of my life were when I first left home and moved in with two friends.  We didn't have the proverbial "pot to piss in" but we put together an apartment from hand-me-downs and flea market and thrift store buys.  And of course we had the best in student chic -- milk crates.

Milk crates were the foundation of any good student apartment and all the dairies left them piled outside, ripe for the picking.  They were sturdy enough with a pillow on top to sit on, a key component in shelving units, but most important and above all else -- they were the perfect size to hold our record collections.  Yep, I'm talking vinyl.  (Until one day they weren't.  I think the dairies finally clued in as to why they were losing so many milk crates and started making them just that little bit too small to fit an album.)

I still have a couple in storage under my stairs.  I have no idea what condition the records are in.  I no longer own a turntable and they haven't been played in years.  All my music is digital now.  What used to take several milk crates to store, now barely touches the space I have on a device the size of a match book.  Nostalgia is reviving the turntable but I have no desire to go down that road.  I'm betting I wouldn't even like half the music stored in those crates.  (I mean, raise your hand if you owned Bim or even heard of him.)

I don't know what I'm going to do with the records when I get to purging under the stairs.  They could stay there I suppose, but to what end?  I tried flogging them off at a garage sale years ago but the only ones that sold were the Beatles albums.  Felt bad about selling those for a long time but not anymore.  Sometimes you have to let things go.  I have all of the Beatles albums in my ITunes library now anyway and the music still brings back the time to me, no matter the format.

On another note...The Beatles Rubber Soul was the first album I ever bought.  Even now, when I listen to the white album, I expect to hear a skip at the beginning of Back in the USSR because that's where my record skipped...music, music, music skip "from Miami Beach" --  there was no "Flew in from" on my album.  That I still hear it that way all these years later is a testament to the power of music and memory.   

What Would You Save?

Sometimes I play mind games with myself.  When I was a kid, whenever Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds was shown on TV (I'm a child of the pre-video/DVD/BlueRay days...hell, I remember when Beta was the latest and greatest, but I digress) I'd spend the next few days figuring out where I was going to hide when -- not if -- the birds waged their attack on my house.  My ultimate hiding place ended up being in the back of my bedroom closet which extended well back beyond the wall with some shelves off the end and to the side.  Kind of a bizarre set up because once the closet was full of clothes, you had to burrow in past them to reach the shelves.  Which made them, in my young mind, a perfect hiding spot.  Of course now my adult mind realizes that had the birds found me in there (and they undoubtedly would have) there would have been no avenue of escape.

The mind game I play most now is "what would I take if imminent disaster was about to wipe out my house and I had, like, 15 minutes to get out."  I play this game whenever the forest fire season starts to threaten communities or when earthquakes start rumbling up and down my coast.  And in this game, kids, critters, wallet and a change of clothes are a given and everything you take has to fit into whatever vehicle you own.  (I have a Prius C so not much space.)  Really makes you stop and consider what stuff amongst your stuff is the most important to you...the stuff you would grieve if it were gone forever.  And considering the amount of stuff in my house, there isn't much.

First, I would grab my computer.  All of my writing is stored there and I could never hope to recreate the stories and the novel that I poured my heart and soul into.  My Dad's and my dog's ashes.  Some special things people made for me:  intarsia bears, a child's chair and a stool made by my Dad; a carved loon crafted by a friend; a painted native drum designed and made for me for my retirement; some paintings done by my daughter.  A couple of cross stitch pieces I made myself.  A pair of salt and pepper shakers that belonged to my grandmother that I've loved since I was a kid.  And a metal sculpture of crows that my Dad gave me (it has a lovely story attached to it.)  That's it.  Kind of puts that attachment to stuff in perspective.

On another note...My daughter thinks I'm weird.  (Maybe you do too after reading about The Birds. But I challenge you to watch that movie and not try to figure out where you'd hide.)  Yesterday I was writing a scene for my new novel in which someone is being choked.  I was trying to describe the sounds the person was making and figured the best way to do that was to put my hand around my own throat, squeeze, and see what sounds I made.  My daughter came into my room thinking the dog was trying to hack up a fur ball to find me at my desk gurgling and trying out different sounds. Probably a good thing I don't own a gun.