A Place for My Stuff

Update. And March 16, 1989.

I think it’s been about 10 years since I started this blog. Most of its visitors seem to be people who search the web for a particular topic, and come to one of my pages. People who had followed it in the past may have concluded that my clutter problem was something I solved, and I lived happily ever after. Not quite. You can fix a car that’s been heavily damaged, but that doesn’t mean you never have to give it regular maintenance again. Likewise, an uncluttered home will inevitably need to be looked at again when things reach a point of getting out of control again.

I’ve reached a point where things have gotten pretty out of control again. But it was from that first major clean-up I took up and used this blog to document, that I learned so much about myself, my old habits, and decluttering. And that’s been helping me take on this new round. So lately I’ve been taking before & after photos along the way. You may see many new “Why the hell do I still have this?!?” photos in the upcoming weeks.

In the meantime, I have an anecdote I’d like to post here. It doesn’t have to do with clutter, but it does have to do with the 30^th anniversary of an event that recently passed. Here it is.

 

March 16, 1989 was one of those eventful days I have a good memory of. I remember four events in particular:

1) It happened to me my friend Danny’s birthday. Though by that time he was in a different school, so I didn’t see him on this day.

2) My homeroom teacher, who was a complete cunt, was actually out that day. That was rare. My wife had ended up having the same teacher some years after I had, and would probably use the same words to describe her.

3) I got into a fight after gym class. I started it. Though I think it would be more accurate to say I finished it. The boy who truly started it had started it with me 2 years before that, when he started to make relentlessly picking on me as a hobby. Did I win the fight? Rumor had it that I did. But in reality the fight was broken up by a teacher before it was finished. But the boy never bothered me again after that day.

4) I saw Metallica that night. It was my first time seeing them, and to this date the only time. Queensryche opened. What a show. I visualized a lot of vengeance and death to that boy from memory #3 as “Creeping Death” played. I managed to talk my mother into letting me stay home from school the next day on account of having been up late. Of course another part of that was not wanting to immediately go back to school the next day after memory #3. My brother, who was at the same concert, ended up going to school that day, much to his dismay.

Those were the big events on that day 30 years ago. I can still remember many little details about #3 and #4 too, for better or worse. It’s one of the curses of having a good long-term memory.

Low balances on too many Vanilla Visa cards? Here's one solution.

One of the biggest magnets for clutter, at least for me, is the open space around my desktop computer. Recently I had to clear this out because my ISP was giving me a new modem.  In cleaning the area, I stumbled across a couple of Vanilla Visa cards.  I had two more I was keeping in my wallet.

For those who aren't familiar with the Vanilla Visa card, it's essentially a prepaid credit card.  A lot of drug stores and supermarkets sell them.  Some companies will give them out as gifts too.  You purchase the card for a flat fee and load it with a set amount of money, either paying for it with cash or from another credit card.  Then you can use it just like a credit card.  There are no additional fees; you already paid that up-front when you bought the card.  Some versions of the card are re-loadable, and some aren't.  I was using these for a while to help keep myself in budget, namely by loading a Vanilla Visa card with a set budgeted amount from my credit card, and then using only that loaded card to make purchases for the month.

One problem with these cards is that you can end up collecting a stack of them with low balances.  You may have one card with a balance of $1.29, another with a balance of $4.90, and a third with $11.50.  Unfortunately, you can't transfer all of those little balances together to one card.  So if you want to buy something that's $15, you're out of luck.  In theory, you could use the $11.50 first, then pay the remainder with one of the other cards, but most places won't let you split payments like that.

I searched on-line for some solutions.  Some suggested using them at the gas station.  It seems like a bit of a hassle to the clerk though to say you want to pay for 21 cents on pump #3, then come back and say you want to add 59 cents using this other card, and so on.  Besides, I think that like many places, some gas stations have a minimal amount that can be charged for a card.

Here's one solution that worked for me: transferring the amounts to Amazon!

Some pages suggested buying separate Amazon gift certificates for each of the separate cards you have, and them redeeming them.  But I found that you can just add them directly to your current Amazon gift card balance.  Here's how I did:

1. Find out the exact balance on each of your card(s).
   • I found out that there's a slight difference between the "Vanilla Gift" and "One Vanilla" cards.  In any case, if you look at the teeny-tiny print on the back of the card, you should see a website you can go to.  Usually it's "VanillaVisa.com".  You might be redirected to a different site from there.
   • In any case, you'll be able to enter in the card's number, expiration date, and CVV (three-digit code found on the back) to check the balance.
   • If it's not accepting the info, double check that you have cookies enabled for the site you're on, that it matches the type of card you had (I found that my "OneVanilla" card uses a different site than my "Vanilla Gift" card) and of course that you've entered everything correctly.
2. Log in to Amazon.com with your Amazon account.
   • I'm talking about the desktop website here, not the mobile app nor the mobile version of the website.  I'm sure you could accomplish it on those too, but I'm writing the directions here for what I'm seeing on the desktop site.
3. Click "Gift Cards & Registry" and "Reload your balance"
4. In the "Amount" box, type in the exact amount you found for one of the cards.
5. In the list of credit cards, click "Add a card".  Enter in the info for you Vanilla card.  
   • You're required to enter a name. I just used my own name and didn't have a problem.  I don't know if the name is actually checked anyway for gift cards.
6. You should now be able to follow the other buttons to transfer the amount on the card to your Amazon.com gift card balance.
7. Repeat this with any other Vanilla cards.

There's one catch to all of this: Amazon won't take any amounts that are less than 50 cents. I checked the balances of my four cards.  I had $0, $1.35, $6.21, and $0.21. The $0 card was useless, so that was simple enough to disregard.  The $1.46 and $6.21 cards were transferred.  This left one card with 21 cents.  The old me would have rationalized, "Let me hold on to this. Maybe I can find some way to transfer this too."  But I decided to just throw it away rather than have the burden of trying to find a way to spend 21 cents.

#VanillaVisa

Freezer explorations, spring 2015

My freezer is pretty magical.  Just when I thought I've dug up and thrown out the expired stuff, I find even stranger things.  Take this, for example.

The "sell by" date?  June 13, 2013.  Yep, this has been sitting in my freezer for at least two years., invariably buried under other stuff.  After taking the photo, I throw the beef in a plastic shopping bag, put that in another plastic shopping bag, tie it up, and put it in my garbage bin.  Next.

In the last town I lived in, there was a nice little coffee shop that had these sorts of fruit sorbet desserts in varieties like lemon, peach, and coconut.  I started seeing lots of other places sell them as desserts.  I haven't seen any in a while though.  Maybe it was a '00s decade thing.  But they would take the real frozen shell of a coconut, or hollowed peel of a lemon or peach, and fill it with that sorbet.

Well, lo and behold, I had a coconut one.  And I have to say, it looked tasty. Some clumps of ice around the edge, and it was no doubt even older than the beef.  But you you know what?  It was edible.  And not bad at all.  I sure as hell wasn't going to try the ground beef, though.

Holey Shoes, Batman!

"I got holes in my shoes,
I got holes in my teeth,
I got holes in my socks,
I can't get no sleep.
I'm tryin' to make a million."

- AC/DC, "Ain't No Fun (Waiting 'Round To Be A Millionaire)"

It's good to be thrifty.  It's good to creatively find ways to reuse or fix things without having to spend money for a replacement.  But there are times when you just have to say, "No, it's really worth spending the extra money to take care of this."

A long-held archetype of being poor, is the pair of shoes with holes in them.  It's right up there with making cat food sandwiches, and ragamuffin fingerless gloves.  (Actually, do poor people even buy and eat cat food anymore, given how cheap human food can be these days?)

I like the slip-on types of dress shoes and low-cut boots.  I've noticed though that after a while, I'd get leaks in them.  I'd only notice this of course when it was raining, and one foot or both would be wet by the time I got to my car. 

So that should be the sign that it's time to get a new pair of shoes, right?  Well, it's not that easy.  Psychologically, my mind comes up with excuses to not have to deal with that.

• "I just bought these last year, so surely I can wear them a little longer."
• "Hey, it's only a problem when it's raining.  So I'll just still wear these most days, and wear one of my other pairs when it's raining."
• "They look fine on the outside anyway."
• "I have that Shoo Goo® glue at home that I bought 10 years ago.  I'll just repair it with that."

Thus of course, the shoes stayed, as my mind kept focusing on bigger and better things every day.  But those invisible leaks eventually became visible holes.  And eventually I reached the point where I said, "Wait a minute, why the hell do I still have these?  I may not be rich, but I sure as hell am not living in poverty right now.  If there's one thing that I should be able to afford for myself, besides food, it's clothing without holes in it!"

I threw away the shoes.  Shopping at Target, I walked by the shoe section, found a nearly identical pair in my size for under $30, and bought them.  Problem solved.

9 Nasty Things to Throw Away Today

A relevant article: http://www.aarp.org/health/healthy-living/info-04-2013/9-nasty-things-to-throw-away-photos/?cmp=BAC-OUTBRAIN-MOB-SLIDE-DSO_27739317_9-Nasty-Things-to-Throw-Away-Today#slide2

Site Changes and Upcoming Posts

After realizing just how crappy my blog looked on a mobile device, I decided to update its looks.  I was almost ready to just quit Typepad and move to Wordpress, but found a way to work through it on Typepad.  Typepad has some great support, too.  They were able to swiftly fix a problem I had with the "Search" feature.  So, hopefully all looks much better now.

Did I ever cure my clutter problem?  Well, I don't know if it's something that can be "cured" entirely.   Now please don't think for one second that I'm giving you the sort of line you hear from 12-step programs about alcohol for example being a "disease" and alcoholics remaining alcoholics for life. I don't buy that philosophy.  Like alcoholism, pack-ratism or hoarding are extreme human behaviors, and I do sincerely believe that behaviors can be exampled and reprogrammed.  No, what I mean by not being so sure that clutter has a cure, is that I've come to realize that this is something you just have to keep on top of every now and then.  Just like a good car needs to have its oil changed once in a while, a home needs to be decluttered once in a while.  So I'll continue to do what I've done before: document the progress, while telling silly stories and giving advice along the way.

Have I made any progress in the years since I've been doing this blog?  Have I learned anything?  You bet!  The photos speak for themselves.  As I recently updated the "About" page of this site to say, there's no way I would have been able to move out of my last apartment if I hadn't started taking action on this. 

I've also been able to change my behaviors and shake old habits that worked against me, such as buying a lot of stuff on impulse when I didn't really need it.  And again, I'm not anti-materialism.  I am shamelessly pro-materialism, and I don't take the pseudo-Buddhist stance that I see a lot of these anti-hoarding blogs and books take on.  But the catch, as I've said in the past, is that getting too focused on the excitement of acquiring new things can lead to not getting the full enjoyment out of the things you already have.  I have gotten better and better at looking at looking at things in a store and saying, "No, I'm not going to buy this.  I have something just like this at home that I haven't used yet, or haven't taken out and enjoyed in a long time.", and at leaving a store empty-handed.

Unfortunately, I've had lapses along the way.  Clutter has an odd way of creeping up invisibly.  The build-ups can happen so gradually that you don't always notice it until maybe you have a guest over the house, or trip on something, or can't find something important.  Then it's time for another full-on battle with the clutter.   So again, I'll be sharing some updates on this over the next few weeks.

Oh yeah, and I turned 40 this year.  With that, has come a mid-life crisis of sorts.  But in a good way.  I'm sure I'll make mentions of that here and there too.

As always, if you just want to read the posts that have to do with clutter clean-up, and not my rants and other blog posts, then you can just click on the "Clutter Combat" category tag.

Even Skeletor has to deal with clutter

From the Facebook page Skeletor Is Love:

New Year's Resolutions? Apparently.

I noticed a huge spike in the number of visitors to this blog on January 1st.  My guess is that there are lots of people who have a clutter problem in their home, made a New Year's resolution to get rid of it this year, and stumbled upon my blog while searching for resources to help them clean up their home.

Do New Year's resolutions (NYRs) "work"?  Well, truth be told, most people give up on them by March, maybe even February.  My friend Tania wrote a great post on her own blog on "New Years Resolutions and Lame Excuses", expressing the frustrations of seeing her gym clog up with the NYR people.  (And I'm borrowing her "NYR" abbreviation here -- thanks, Tania!)

Now I'm certainly not here to discourage people.  Plenty of people have been able to set a goal and achieve it, whether they started on January 1st or some other date of the year, and whether or not it was getting rid of overwhelming clutter in their homes.  So what made them different from the people who didn't meet their NYRs?  I suppose the obvious answer is "Well, they just didn't give up!", but that seems a little too simple to me.  A buzz phrase like "Be motivated!" is easier said than done.

So for what it's worth, here's my advice on how to actually see your NYRs through to completion.  Yes, I know that some of this is going to sound trite, or "obvious", or "common sense".  Yes, I know that you've probably read a lot of these points elsewhere before, whether it was on somebody else's blog or at some "goal-setting workshop" seminar.  But maybe that's because there's really some truth to it.

• Write it out.  This goes for the next two items, at the very least. You may say, "Oh no, I don't have to write it out.  I've got it."  No, write it down.  That means turning away from a screen for 5 minutes, grabbing a pen and a piece of paper, not opening a new window and typing.  "Uh, well, my handwriting sucks." Well gee, maybe that's because you don't write enough.  Hey, maybe improving your handwriting -- to the level of legibility -- should be one of your goals this year. Look, you don't have to write an essay, here.  Just half of a page may do. If you can't even do something as mundane as that, then what makes you think you can accomplish the goal you have in mind?  When you write something out, you're not only being more affirmative with yourself, but you also won't fall into the trap of rewording the goal in your mind as the year goes on. And these next two things are the things you'll write down:
  
• Have your goal(s) be specific and objectively observable/measurable. That's because if your goal is really vague, then you're not really going to know if and when you've met it, let alone if you're headed in the right direction.  I know lots of people for example make a resolution "To lose weight".  Or rather, since most goal-setting programs will tell you to reword things in the grammatically positive: "To be thin".  OK, but what does that mean?  Do you know how much weight you want to lose?  When to lose it by?  Those are things that you can actually measure along the way.  Have you checked with a doctor or some other health professional (read: not some random free BMI website that you found) to make sure you're not being too unrealistic or risky, like thinking you can lose 50 pounds in a week? 
  Regarding clutter, the same goes for resolutions like "To get my house clean".  That's great.  But again, be more specific with yourself.  Maybe there's one specific room that needs the most attention.  Maybe getting all non-furniture items off of the floor in one room would be an amazing enough goal itself.  But I'll talk more about individual tasks in the third point.
• WHY do you want this? No, really: why? As silly as it sounds, you'd be surprised how easy it can be to get so caught up in tasks that you overlook why you're doing them in the first place. Then you can fall into the trap where you find yourself doing tasks just for the sake of doing them. Think of the great things you'll gain by meeting the goal.  Then think of some more.  Write them down (yes, short-hand and sentence fragments are OK, just get them out of your head and on to paper, where you can look at them).  This not only helps you keep things going in the right direction, but also gives you the drive in the first place.  Maybe you want your home to be clutter-free because you want to be able to have friends over the house.  And you don't want to have to keep on tripping over stuff.  You're sick of not knowing where things are.  You know there are buried treasures underneath all of those papers that can get you money on Craigslist. You know that you deserve to have a home that you can be happy about having.  Whatever the reasons, write them down.  It shouldn't take too long.
• Break your goal down into smaller goals. Another problem with a vaguely-stated goal is that it can sound really huge. It's generally easier to do a dozen small tasks than it is to do one giant, intimidating task.  So break down your goal into parts.  For example, maybe "Clean my house" breaks down into: 1) get all the papers off the floor in the bedroom, 2) clean my shower, 3) go through the things in this stack of boxes, etc.
  If you're a real ADHD type, maybe you can break them up in some way that isn't necessarily sequential.  For example, break things down into 20 different parts that are pretty much independent of each other, so that you can pick different ones to work in different orders on a whim.  Of course, still have something like "Complete 3 of these tasks by the end of the month, then 5 more next month, etc." as your goals.
• Similarly, break it down into time segments. Instead of having one goal for this calendar year, you can break down down month by month, or into quarters (that means four 3-month periods, for those of you who suck at math).  It's good to have at least some kinds of deadlines other than December 31st.  This makes it less likely for you to blow things off.  You know that terribly cliche job interview question of "Where do you see yourself 5 years from now?"  Well, try that with "3 months", "6 months", "9 months" and "1 year".
• Get some resources.  Maybe you know some people who have the same things you want to achieve, and they'd be willing to give you some advice or guidance.  Maybe you need to get a book or two on the topic, or find places where you can take lessons on something.  Chances are good that other people have done whatever it is you want, or at least something very comparatively similar.  Make use of that information.  But only really listen to the ones who have results to show, not some random stranger from the internet.  
• Make the work desirable. Now here's something that they usually don't tell you at all of these fluffy goal-setting seminars.  If you view the upcoming work ahead as being an inconvenient pain in the ass, then you're probably not going to really work at it.  Make the work an indulgence, not an act of self-loathing discipline.  This does NOT mean you have to be self-deceiving.  I'm not telling you to get on the treadmill until your heart is about to burst, and try to tell yourself that you love it.  You can however think of going to the gym as the time when you get to get out of the house and away from most of the people you have to deal with, and a time that you can listen to your favorite music without interruptions. Maybe there's a similar way to take an activity you need to do, and view the same exact activity as the opportunity to simultaneously do something you enjoy.  As I've said here in the past, this blog helped me finally get off my ass and clean my house because cleaning something meant having something to blog about, and a good excuse to be my usual witty wise-ass self to the public by writing things like this.
• Plan it out. Schedule time to work on it.  I'm not saying you have to schedule things down to the nearest hour, although I'm sure that approach works for some people.  But at least start getting some of the specific tasks planned out by setting aside days and at least rough blocks of time for doing what you have to do.  Don't find yourself stuck in March saying, "Gee, I really oughtta start doing this sometime."
• Document progress.  This is vital for two reasons.  First of all, you can't recognize progress if you don't have an earlier point of reference.  Maybe this will be "before" and "after" photos.  Maybe if your goal is to get thinner, this means recording your weight every week.  The other reason to do this is because it motivates you more.  You can look back and see that what you're doing is "working", because you're doing better than you were doing before.  This also goes back to the point about specific goals: if you try to oversimplify your body as either "fat" or "skinny", or your home as either "cluttered" or "clean", then invariably you're going to see that things aren't perfect, and thus mistakenly think that you're still in the former category, and thus think that you're not making any progress.  You're not going to accomplish everything in one day. 

Again, I know a lot of these may sound lame, but I think these are the sorts of things that separate a person who makes New Years Resolutions and meets them, from the majority of people who make them and never go anywhere beyond that.  Which one are you?

Black Friday and Stuff

Some of you might assume that this is going to be a rant against Black Friday and shopping.  Well, it isn't.  In fact, I think all of that I-boycott-Black-Friday blogging from people gets really old really fast.

I don't know who's the most annoying of the annual Thanksgiving Weekend protesters:

1. The loud-mouth vegans who, every year, proudly have to inform the rest of us that Thanksgiving is an evil holiday of meat eating (and probably don't have any friends or family who'd invite them to their house anyway)
2. The honky college students who, every year, proudly have to inform the rest of us how Thanksgiving is oh so evil to Native Americans, or...
3. The self-righteous technophobic twits who, every year, proudly have to inform the rest of us that they refuse to do any shopping on Black Friday. (As if they had the money or the good will to buy a TV or a computer as a gift on any other day of the year.)

Some people might think that Black Friday goes hand in hand with the problem of having too much stuff than you can use, but that's not really the case. I suppose that if you're an impulse buyer, then Black Friday may be something you should strive to avoid.  But very few Black Friday shoppers are hoarders, and little if any of the stuff overcrowding a hoarder's home was bought from a Black Friday deal.  If you do have your sights on a particular upper-cost item (TV, computer, etc.) for yourself or for somebody else, that you want brand new, and that you think will really, really get a lot of use, then maybe plotting out a killer deal on a Black Friday is the way to go.

So having said that, here are a couple of meme pics I made.

Time to Bag the Old Bag (part 2)

Happy Turkey Day!  If you came to this site looking for stuffing recipes, well, this isn't the place.  This "A Place for My STUFF", not a "A Place for My STUFFING".

Still reading after that terrible observation joke?  Good, then lets continue.



Last time I mentioned a big bag o' stuff and the strange things in it.  Here were some of the other items:

• Tiny black top hat.  Was this in case any spider monkeys or lemurs come to visit for a formal dinner?  No, it was something I bought in a craft store for a Residents-related project that I just haven't gotten around to.  Maybe a doll of sorts.  In any case, this can be placed in a better place than at the top of a bag in the middle of my floor.
• Giant magnifying glass.  I'm not sure what prompted me to get this. Had I been working on some kind of tiny electronics or something?  Or did I just like the elegant look of it?  Well, I'm putting this one with the rest of the office/desk supplies.
• USB Car charger.  Good to have, I suppose.  But I have a separate drawer that this sort of stuff goes in now, so that's where it's going.
• CD labels.  Oh but not just any labels.  No a few sheets of GLOSSY labels!  Wow!  Well, time to put these with the other few CD labels I have.
• Diablo II info.  All about runes and rings and necklaces, etc. from the game Diablo II.  Maybe this could come in handy if I start playing the game again.  But since I don't know when that would ever be, and since I could find this stuff again on-line just like I did the first time around, there's no point in holding on to this.  Into the trash you go.
• Eddie Izzard "Sexie" 2-CD.  I was wondering where this went to!  Promptly ripped and put back on the shelf with the rest of the Eddie Izzard, which is with the rest of my stand-up comedy CDs.