Get rid of stuff

The idea of having so much stuff you have to throw it out makes me uneasy. Our culture (USA) is so obsessed with having lots of belongings that it wrecks havoc on the environment. Resources are stripped from the planet just to manufacture these thing. Many of them are cheaply made so people can get them on sale at Walmart. Then after a few uses, we tend to stuff them in a basement/attic corner. It piles up for years, and then if we are lucky we find time to get rid of it. Then the landfills are taxed because all this crap will now go there and sit there for thousands of years.

So as long as I can be somewhat “green” about this, it’s very therapeutic and rewarding. I am also reading a book called Living the Simple Life by Elaine St. James. I read a couple of chapters, then get rid of more stuff.

This is not just about getting rid of stuff. It’s also about making the stuff you have useful. For example, I have several bags of boys’ clothing. My son who is nearly 3 can use this stuff. It would be a shame if I just went out and bought him a whole new wardrobe because I forgot about these bags of clothes. I would have to yet again have them donated or they would wind up in the trash! Luckily I came across the bags just in time.

So now I am washing the donated clothes to create his fall wardrobe. I am using a long cycle with hot water because I smell a strong perfume on the clothes. To ease my guilt I will line dry the load.

The other day I tossed out a ton of old bills, checks, bank statements, check stubs, etc. I composted some of it and recycled the rest.

I’m getting there little by little. Hopefully I won’t have much to throw out and this goal is just a matter of organizing. Whatever I do have to get rid of I really hope another family can use it.

I gave away more books and my great son got a lot of stuff out of his room to go to Good Will.

i was turned on to freecycle when i moved this past fall. so i try to post to freecycle once a month. anything that isn’t picked up is donated.

i joined a livejournal community of plus-sized girls. ever friday we’re allowed to make sales posts. it allows me to get rid of some of the things in my closet that i don’t wear/can’t fit and make a couple dollars for them.

Sold it to the Ca$h Converters. It was fun and funny at the same time.

Too much stuff in the garage that I will never use.

It would free up space to move.

Last week I spent a day organizing our old magazines (three horrifically messy boxes of them, which my six year old has been rereading, so it was worth saving them since her older sisters were her age!).

The Ladybugs and Stone Soups went to my friend DB—the former for her classroom, don’t know why she took the latter but I wasn’t going to argue.

The ZooBooks have gone to the school I’m starting, and I’m also going to transfer the Ranger Ricks there when I find more magazine holders or some way to corral them.

Still sitting on a bunch of years-old Crickets and Spiders, and (in yet more boxes) Friends Journals, The Sun and a few old Mothering magazines which I’d like to donate to a prison (made that a thing a few weeks back, haven’t moved on it yet).

I assembled all the Sun magazines from this year so far and sent them off to my friend DG who is recovering from a kidney transplant and perhaps could use some good reading material. I threw in the DVD collections of “Firefly” and “Freaks and Geeks” as well.

Also I did eventually hand off that bag of kid clothes mentioned in the last entry to EK at the park.

This is quite a process!

Mission accomplished.

Make sure you check at goodwill for all my shit.

a regular cardboard recycling run because my municipality has started to accept corrugated cardboard. This means I don’t have to save it for the 30-minute drive to the recycling center in Bethlehem, so it doesn’t stack up.

haven’t moved anything over to the consignment shop in a few weeks, but I have outgrown S clothes to give away, all neatly bagged for display at the park.

course S had a croupy cough and laryngitis today so we skipped the park, but soon …

Yesterday I went on a “get rid of shit” rampage and cleaned out the closet in my bathroom and underneath my bed. I threw out dozens of lotions that were about empty and from like 3 years ago, gross, and a bunch of waterbottles that were under my bed that were covered in dust, blah! Its nice having a bed with nothing underneath it. The next step is to get rid of at least half of the hundred or so magazines that I have saved in the past few years. Thats going to be hard, I love them!!!

All the bags and boxes in this photo went out the very next day: the shoe-clothes box for the stuff that’s not saleable, our dear neighbor’s consignment shop for clothes that she can sell [I don’t consign, just donate], friends littler than S. for first choice of her outgrown rubber boots and windbreakers and tevas and other such goodies.

The only thing I had left was the bag of utterly-worn-out textiles destined for the recycling center in Bethlehem, and the next day I added all the recycling in the shed (3-6 plastics and cardboard) and got rid of all THAT to boot.

Yippee! This allowed me to make much better use of my storage space (see goal #1), as the canning stuff and extra-large stockpots moved onto the storage shelves formerly stuffed with stuff that was on its way out.

Ahhhhhh.