When in doubt, throw it out

...into the trash can today! No doubts about it. :)

...that have been ruined by my cats. At least one of my cats (and I think I know which one) has taken up the habit of gnawing on leather, and now the once-lovely leather of all three pairs is covered with kitty fang indentations, scratches, and torn places. One of the three pairs would have to go back to the shoe repair shop anyways, as the sole is coming loose; another pair were not as comfortable as they look; and the soles of the third pair are quite worn; and 2 of the pairs always seem to need new shoe laces. I guess when I buy new shoes, I had better save the shoe boxes and store them in the boxes, especially if they’re leather.

I also have some belts hanging in the closet, and I noticed some telltale tooth marks on a few of them. Sigh... Most of the belts are not very good quality, and I’m also tossing the worst ones.

UPDATE 11/13: I found some shoe polish, and polished two of the pairs of shoes this morning, and it really made the shoes look so much better that I was amazed! I wore one of the pairs today. I am going to take the third pair to a shoe repair place, along with another different pair that needs a repair.

And, I found a high-up shelf in the closet where they will hopefully be out of the reach of my shoe-eating cats.

The belts are definitely going bye-bye, though, along with a few other miscellaneous pieces of clothing that can be donated.

...lifeless and flattened and dried, which brought back lots of memories. Years ago, I discovered a small, green, perfectly preserved frog on the floor of my office at work, and after showing him around to friends and co-workers, they all started bringing me offerings of other assorted petrified animals (mostly insects and reptiles), and we started a petrified zoo by arranging our collection in a glass fishbowl. It was a lot of fun, a creative if rather macabre outlet for office tension, and a great conversation starter for new visitors to my office.

After my enjoyable little interlude of reminiscing, I considered starting another petrified zoo, since I still have an unused glass fishbowl and my happy memories. But my doubts helped me decide to throw out the poor little lizard. Maybe I can get rid of that fishbowl, too.

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The lampshade looks a lot like the one above, except it’s old and covered with very yellowed silk that I’m sure was elegant once-upon-a-time.

Actually, it’s one of a pair of matching old yellowed lampshades, which came with a pair of lamps which a friend gave me last year after she didn’t sell them at a flea market. One lamp is in a back room, and one is on my desk. (Uh, one of my desks. The desk I’d be using right now if it weren’t so cluttered with piles of papers.)

Yesterday I remembered that I had one “brand-new” still-in-plastic lampshade, that I’d bought several years ago to go with another lamp, but which wasn’t quite right for that lamp. I had a thought that this new lampshade might go well quite well with my desk lamp, and, lo and behold, I was right! It makes the desk look so much brighter and happier, in spite of the piles of paper clutter.

But as one thing often leads to another, I decided that I’d like to replace a sad-looking little picture behind the “new” lamp with something better to look at, and I went digging in a storage drawer labeled “to be framed”. OMG, I had not looked in that drawer for a very long time, and it was almost completely full of very old calendars with interesting pictures, and a few old cards and rolled up posters and other miscellany.

I did find an old National Geographic map of the world and an old poster frame to hang on the wall above my “new desk”, and that is a definite improvement, looking nice with my “new lamp.” I hope to move back to this desk today and start sorting through the stacks of papers, since I’ve made definite progress in the kitchen, and would like to stop using the kitchen table as my “desk.”

The bad news is that I still have the old, now-replaced, yellowed lampshade. And, I still have the rediscovered pile of very old calendars sitting here at my feet. And, my hoarding brain is trying put doubts in my mind about why I should hang on to these things. (Surely I can salvage the lampshade. What if I need the pair of lamps to have matching shades again someday? Surely I can do something with these calendar pictures. Yes, but when? The answer “someday” is just not good enough!)

So, today is a new opportunity to throw this stuff out (or recycle it perhaps). Will I take advantage of it, or will I let my Inner Hoarder talk me out of it?

...which has only half the bristles left. It’s a relatively young hairbrush, and yet, sadly, it is not aging well. Goodbye, hairbrush!

For some crazy reason I was saving several bottles of liquor in the top shelf of the pantry: a bottle of Cognac, half a bottle of Kahlua, and a quarter of a bottle of Triple Sec, leftovers from my ex-dh. Even though I don’t drink liquor any more, my pack-rat brain was telling me that I might use them someday in cooking or baking, or give them to a friend. But last month I asked a friend if she wanted them, and when she found out how old they were, she said no thanks. So, last night I poured the liquor down the drain, and put the bottles out for the trash pickup.

The trash & recycling goes out tonight. I’m going to see if I can go through the 2 big boxes in this room, and take a lot of it to the curb.

I know I will have all kinds of doubts, but let’s see if I can throw out or recycle a bunch of it anyways.

This article claims that 3 million Americans NEVER throw ANYTHING out, even old newspapers and yogurt cups, “in a twisted logic of perfectionism and fear” that has been experimentally observed on MRI scans of the brains of hoarders at Connecticut’s Hartford Hospital:
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On a video link, psychologist David Tolin held up their junk mail and asked whether to save it or run it through a document shredder. The hoarder’s brains showed activity spikes in one part of the brain.
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“Their brains screamed that they were making an error,” Dr. Tolin said. “So they put down the mail, and the clutter builds up.”
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I read the article to my mom on the phone last week, and we had a good laugh, visualizing my brain, lit up like a Christmas tree, screaming, “No, don’t you dare throw out that junk mail!” I remember my dad telling the story of the day he tried to throw away stuff in his mother’s house, which was overflowing. I believe she was one of the 3 million who never throw anything out. She kept trying to fish stuff back out of the trash can as fast as he could throw it in, so he started deliberately dropping breakable things, old dishes or glass jars, maybe, into the trash can so they would break, and my grandmother sobbed and pleaded, “No, stop, don’t throw it away.”
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Sigh. I’ve inherited my grandmother’s brain. I think I’ll throw away this clipping right now. I don’t want to end up like my grandmother.

Last night, while searching for some missing tax papers, the search morphed into an effort to find some empty boxes to sort the paperwork as I was searching through it. That led to the rediscovery of more wreaths, and remnants of wreaths. Old pine cones. Old ribbons. Falling-apart artificial flowers and berries. Lots of ancient dried eucalyptus, which still smelled good but looked pretty bad. And some miscellaneous other stuff.

I salvaged one wreath and hung it on the back door. The rest is waiting to go out with the trash tonight. And now I’ve got some empty boxes for paper-sorting.

Now if I can only find those missing papers. I know they’re here somewhere.