Day 9: Attachment

Though not an actual picture capturing yesterday's unpleasant moment, the reaction here is pretty similar to what happened during the great bib purge of the Minimalist Challenge.

Between Karla and I, we used Karla's Days 8 and 9 and my Day 9 to clean our china cabinet of 26 baby bibs. It wasn't until later at night last night did Z notice mom taking some things away. A vocal protest ensued with arguments for keeping to include "no," "mine," and "no take my bibs." Oddly enough, even when Z was bib-using age, bibs were not things she generally liked wearing or using, at least during meals. To be fair, she liked opening the drawer and pulling the bibs out.

But there's certainly something to be said about the comfort of having things belong to a person. Even if I believe there to have been minimal attachment or sentimentality to the object, Z had a very visceral and real reaction to the thought of her possessions being taken away at its most basic level.

She did not sign-up for the Minimalist Challenge. I suspect there may be more difficult times ahead. Hang in there.

Day 8: Harder than it Looks

Into the second week of the Minimalist Challenge and one thing has become abundantly clear: making it all 30 days is not going to be easy. In fact, I'm having serious doubts whether I'll be able to complete the challenge. Sadly, for me, part of the difficulty rests beyond the paring down of items but as much with the sheer volume and actual preparation of the process. It's not a coincidence the blog was quiet and I spent days catching up.

But I am up to date challenge wise with some difficult decisions made. That's the point, right? What do I actually use and/or need. Certainly not a lot of what was passed on though I wouldn't have minded holding on to some items had it not been for the challenge itself.

Without further ado, the details: five hats, six DS/3DS games, seven pairs of shoes, and eight neckties. I have done hat purges before and I still have more hats than I need or where. Some nostalgic hats remain in my collection (Berkeley and MIT as some friends' locations of work and study). The tough hat to pass along was a signed Chicago Bears hat. It was white and had a couple of signatures, notably, Gale Sayers. It was a gift but it didn't really fit and there were some odd, non-notable signatures on the hat as well.

I always have mixed feelings about trading in games because I never get anywhere near what I paid for them. But there are always new games to play and these aren't them. I did manage to squeak out $17 or so of credit for them at GameStop, but the value came from the New Super Mario Bros. ($10) and Monster Hunter 4 ($5), the latter the only one for the current GameBoy system. The other four titles were in the realm of $0.20 each. I did get to put the credit to my preorder for Pokemon Sun coming out next month.

Karla gives me a hard time because I have a lot of specialty shoes. Basketball shoes are not the same as tennis shoes. Walking shoes are not the same as running shoes. Mountain biking shoes are not the same as road biking shoes. I had a tougher time getting to seven pairs to pass along, but the truth of the matter is that five of these pairs of shoes had been in a big in the basement as worn out or not used often enough to keep upstairs. Probably the toughest to let go would be the blue Chuck Taylors. They are hardly worn, but I am past the days of regular Chuck Taylor use and I do have at least three more pairs, including the wine crushed velvet platforms that are a tad too small, but I can't seem to let go just in case.

Today was tie day. Sadly, I'd have loved to keep the two orange ones, especially the Thai silk one, but alas, the oil stains from dropped fried chicken bits just weren't coming out. Some of these have been worn quite often and are getting threadbare. The DePaul and the Winnie the Pooh weren't worn enough for me to justify holding on to them.

So there you have it. Day 8 in the books. I think Karla is up to date as well. Good luck this week, everyone!

Jessica: Days 4 and 5

Since I had so much success going through jigsaw puzzles on Day 3, I did it again on Day 4:

The four puzzles with missing pieces are on the right. I was disappointed that the ocean puzzle in the canister was missing pieces, because I remember that being a fun one, but I counted the pieces twice and came up short both times. Oh well. The puzzle in the middle went to the rapidly-growing snowday shelf, and the puzzle on the left is back in the basement and probably going to Goodwill later in the challenge. To be honest, there's nothing wrong with it and we could still get some use out of it, but I have picked up the pieces for that one so many times that I'm pretty sure I can't do it again without losing my mind. And we have no shortage of fun puzzles.

For Day 5 I was going to find things to trash/recycle in the toy heap, but the first several things I found while poking around were all best suited for Goodwill, so I decided to do some work in the coal cellar instead. Although it still has a coal door to the outside, it was turned into a walk-in storage closet long before we moved in, so we just use it for a variety of different things (many of which you'll be seeing over the next few weeks). Today I was able to find five things to get rid of almost immediately:

What we have here is a dried-up paint set (I think maybe it was used to paint a birdhouse?), an old science kit, a very old and nonfunctional Simon, a jar of expired peanut-butter substitute, and a green bag of random trash. I recycled what I could and put the rest into the trash.

On to Day 6 tomorrow!

More Than Four

So in response to Karla's questioning of my commitment to the Minimalist Challenge, I did not just subtract four items from The Drawer.

One pile of junk (consisting of seven glue sticks, a number of pens, two broken Fitbit zip covers, three matchbooks), one old free Reds hat, and two old cycling jerseys on the chopping block. I will donate the jerseys though I do not know whether that's something people would necessarily want or need at the Goodwill.

But who could turn down the retro chic of WordPerfect and 3.5'' floppies? TWSS.

Day 4, ten+ items. Karla's Challenge contributions included two rings and two scarves. There are a lot of scarves...

"Really? That's all?"

Yes. That's all.

Yes. They were in the drawer. Or rather The Drawer. And yes, the above question was Karla's incredulous inquiry as to my daily challenge met. I consider today a productive day: a lock without a known combination, a broken Halo Action Clix used more as decoration than play piece (and not a decoration at all in The Drawer), and a laser pointer for the kitties with an almost dead battery.

For her part, Karla got rid of another pair of shoes, one mug, and one necklace. Three days, twelve items total for our house. I've been told from a reliable source that completion of the challenge means 465 items moved. That's 930 for Karla and I.

So are my three items small today? Yes. But The Drawer is just that much more manageable than it was two days ago.

Jessica: Days 1, 2, and 3

Since I was the one who suggested this challenge after seeing on Facebook that my cousin completed it, I wanted to start Day 1 off with something big. I'd already decided that my focus would mostly be in the basement, which is where all the junk tends to migrate, because of gravity or something. There are several big items down there worth getting rid of--unused pinata? box of old 45s? about a dozen broken dining room chairs?--but I decided to start with the one that was giving me the most grief. So, for Day 1, I got rid of this:

This was my crib. I used it for all three of my kids and it's served us well, but it's from 1977 and so no one else will take it and I can't donate it to anyone. (Yes, before our oldest was born my husband and I pored over the actual safety regulations used for modern cribs and it met all of them. I never worried about it. Still, the law's the law, and I probably wouldn't take someone else's baby equipment from four decades ago either.) I'm definitely done having kids, so I wasn't wistful about it in that sense, but it's a good sturdy thing and you hate to see something like that turned into trash. There's nothing else that could be done about it, though, so it was time to rip off that band-aid. 

For Day 2, I got rid of a bag of trash that I'd filled several months ago and not bothered to take out of the basement, and also this big bookshelf support that we haven't used since we moved into this house and reconfigured our bookshelves. 

That was in 2009, so--yeah. It was time for that to go. This was an easy day because I didn't have any sentimental attachment to any of it, so it was just a matter of carrying two things out. 

Today was Day 3, and I decided to start tackling the jigsaw puzzles in the basement. We have a whole lot of these, and I knew some were missing pieces but I didn't know which. They don't take up all that much space, but it was a project I'd been putting off. I decided the way to count it was to go through the puzzles until I found three with missing pieces, recycle those, and call it a day. Here are the results:

On the right in the wooden boxes are puzzles with missing pieces. (No surprise there. Those Melissa and Doug four-packs got a whole lot of use in this house.) They went into the recycling bin. The pile in the middle went up to the snowday emergency shelf. The ones on the left, which are in fine shape but which I think all the kids have outgrown, went back to the basement and will probably get sorted into a box for Goodwill later in the challenge.

Not too shabby for the first three days! I'm pleased.

Day Two: Slow and Steady

I have avoided thinking too much about the Minimalist Challenge. Towards the end of the second day, I hadn't made any definite decisions of must-go items. I thought, however, our kitchen drawer is probably a nice treasure trove of things that are not needed.

The picture does not do complete justice as to how much junk there really is in the drawer. The truest experience of the go-to repository of things best unseen but not placed in a proper location can be found in the process of opening and closing the drawer, met with a tad of resistance because there's just too much stuff to open cleanly.

From the depth, I pulled these two plastic pieces:

I did not see any accompanying packing tape for the left piece. As for the Kerokerokeropi PEZ dispenser, that item has a very specific memory which created a bit of reluctance to dump. I bought this dispenser at the Cincinnati airport before Z's first plane trip. It was also Z's first but not last PEZ dispenser. To be honest, she was definitely too young to use and probably too young to have. We were traveling to Boston for NAFSA in May 2015.

PEZ carry an extra significance because Z's godmother is a PEZ dispenser collector. However, I won't tell godmother or Z that I passed Kerokerokeropi on. In fact, seeing and knowing the amount of space collecting something like PEZ dispensers can require make it easier to minimize.

Karla is on board the Minimalist Challenge too. And here are our Day Two totals: