A Place for My Stuff

More Frige Adventures

Here again we come to one of those places that really needs to be explored and cleaned once in a while.  It's the Refrigerator.

There was something nasty smelling inside.  I went through the draw.  Sometimes this draw is labeled "Crisper".  It should be labeled "Hidden, Forgotten, Rotting Vegetables".  I really didn't know cucumbers could be this color.  That paled in comparison to the expired items I threw away.

 

Pen Quest

Here's a challenge you can do at home, even if you think it's a tidy home.

1) Get a mug or a cup that you're really not using.
2) Look around the room for pens, pencils, crayons, and markers.
3) Put them in the cup
4) Repeat steps 2-3 for the other rooms in the house

How did you do?  I got 8 this time myself, and added them to the infamous "home pen cup".

BONUS ROUND CHALLENGE:

5) Test each pen.
6) If the pen works, put it back in the cup.
7) If it doesn't write, THROW THAT FUCKER AWAY!  Yes, it's OK to throw away a pen that doesn't work.  It happens.  And you have more that DO work.  Save yourself the future frustration and get rid of the pens that don't work.

"Use it, or lose it". Cliche, but effective.

The floor mats to my old car were still sitting by the porch window.  I never got around to putting them in my new car.  I asked my wife, "Didn't you say you needed floor mats in your car?"  She did.  So I prompty picked them up and put him in her car.  Simple, short, and effective.  I wish all clutter was this simple to take care of.  (And no, it's not.  Really.  Otherwise I wouldn't have this blog in the first place.)

It's the Rotting Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

"Ewww!" gagged my wife as she cleaned near the end table.  It was the pumpkin we bought back in October.  It was very green then, so that meant it would be lasting longer than it normally would have. But this one was...no longer solid.  It was practically melted on the table.

How could we have overlooked something like this?  Right in the living room?  I don't know.  As much of a pack rat as I may be, one thing I've always prided myself in is not hoarding any sort of vegetable substances or perishable items.  I may have had cardboard from food boxes sitting in the corner of my kitchen, but certainly not with rotting food inside.  So this was quite a shock.

But again, how DID we miss such a thing?  Well first of all, it didn't smell.  I'm sure we would have noticed something sooner if it did.  Second of all, it was on the end table next to the couch, but in a corner of the living room that's easy to look over.  I think we might have even had a piece of paper or somthing over it.  So there it sat, overlook and forgotten until it was time to clean.  And clean it, I did.

"Hoarding a growing problem in East Iowa"

Or probably more realistically, "People in Iowa are paying more attention to hoarders".  As I've said before, this isn't anything new, and I started this blog before it became a seeming trend.

"Hoarding was considered for years to be a manifestation of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but the psychiatric profession is revising its diagnostic manual to separate the two"

Read the full article here:

http://thegazette.com/2011/03/05/hoarding-a-growing-problem-in-east-iowa/

 

Louie Anderson on Clutter

I just came back from celebrating my birthday in my favorite city on the planet, Las Vegas.  One of the many, many things I did out there was see Louie Anderson live.  Besides having a hilarious set that night, I also got a chance to meet him and hang out with him.  I even have a birthday gift I'll be sending out to HIM in a few weeks.

I also picked up one of his books, Goodbye Jumbo...Hello, Cruel World.  I read it from cover to cover on the plane ride back home.  Most of the book deals with his own struggle with losing weight, the loss of his mother, and dealing with the huge dysfunctional family he was born into.  He does however also talk about clutter, and even did so in his live act that night too.  Here are a few relevant quotes from the book that I really liked:

• "When something loses its meaning ... it's just stuff."
• [After inheriting a box of items from his mother when she passed away] "If my mom's life could be fit into a little box, what the hell was I doing with a houseful of stuff?  Stuff that I don't even like?"
• "Not only didn't I know what was in most of these boxes, but I'd been doing just fine without it. [...] It was time to rid myself of the trappings of a past I no longer needed.  This is what I had feared so much? I laughed."