Office Supply Trash

Day 342: Office Supply Trash

This stuff is trash masquerading as office supplies. These objects were together in a little pod of things that my next-door-neighbor Barbara left when she moved. You remember, back six or eight years ago, when I told Barbara that I would take anything she couldn't bring herself to get rid of. I promised either to use it, or get rid of it myself.

Barbara couldn't bring herself to get rid of these, and so I kept them, too. The mailing envelope is tattered and torn and would need lots of tape to make it usable. The tape, however, is not sticky.

I wonder if unwillingness to get rid of something is contagious.

Drawerful of Razors and More

Day 318: Drawerful of Razors and More

When we were in high school, my brother would always finish the Dorito's and put the empty bag back in the cupboard. I had the experience again and again of reaching into the cupboard for some delectable treat, only to find the package empty. Therefore, it should not come as a surprise to me to find the drawers and cupboard of the upstairs vanity full of junk so useless, it is fair to all it garbage.

Such as these dull razors, a single hair roller, a suction cup to hang an unidentified item, and a lid.

Sam asks how I can possibly blog about garbage, and there's a certain embarrassing truth to the question. On the one hand, I'm hitting rock bottom here. On the other hand, how could a person keep a drawerful of garbage. Especially when there are only two tiny working drawers?

Potholders

Day 312: Potholders

Why keep replacing the cotton
when silicone lasts forever?

What is silicone anyway? I believed it to be a form of plastic, but no. It's a unique substance, two molecules of silicon, one of oxygen, combined with hydrogen or carbon, invented in 1901. Semi-organic. It's strange to think that my lobster claw potholder could also be used as a breast implant, a lubricant, a raincoat, shampoo, fire retardant, silly putty or eco-friendly dry-cleaning chemicals.

My sister made me feel better about my trashed, burned and stained kitchen linens. I often feel just a little frustrated with myself because I can't seem to keep stuff nice. All my resolutions - not to wear work shoes to weed the garden, not to walk eight miles in a cashmere sweater, not to scrub the sink with the pretty flower-handled dish brush, not to put loose pieces of chewing gum in the bottom of my purse - are easily forgotten in the moment. But Elizabeth says that kitchen linens must be replaced from time to time. Not even Martha Stewart can keep them nice. And she gave me a set of hand-knitted cotton dishrags.

Ah, but silicone! Silicone potholders never get stained or burned. They're odd and rubbery. It's a bit hard to get the hang of using them. But once you do, you can take even the hottest chicken pot pie out of the oven without burning your fingers. I bought one from IKEA because it looks like a lobster claw. I had hoped that it might trigger a Rich-riff worthy of John Stewart. Indeed, it did. But now the riff is past, and the lobster-claw turns out to be the sturdiest and most useful of our potholders. Only one caveat: mice eat silicone potholders when the weather gets cold enough.

Halloween Mask

Day 264: Halloween Mask

Though scary, it's hard to breath
inside this thing.
And it doesn't smell good either.

This Halloween mask says it all. Are moods like this catching? I won't bore you with the details - the mistakes I made, the mistakes others made that impacted me, and the tiny stressors that fit in amongst the larger errors - but the cumulative effect was a bad mood. Perhaps my most egregious error was bringing half an acorn squash, a banana, and nothing else for lunch, which was delicious but lacked the necessary food energy to keep the rest of the stressors in perspective. On top of that, although almost the entire morning was meeting-free, I nevertheless did not have time to go outside, even for a 15-minute walk around Willow Pond.

Heading for the basement. There's no mood so black that 45 minutes of Star Trek  and the elliptical machine can't lighten it.

Wrapping Paper Detritus

Day 263: Wrapping Paper Detritus

Ever wonder why RubberMaid isn't
spelled RubberMade? I do.

I try to mitigate the environmental impact of wrapping gifts. I have lots of ways of doing this. Reusing other stuff, like old maps and funny papers. Smoothing and saving wrapping paper and bows, just like mothers did in 1931. Buying spools of grosgrain ribbon at the PTO Thrift Shop and using it year after year. Making present bags out of fabric scraps. Cutting up old greeting cards to use as present tags. If I'm really tempted to buy festive new paper, I shoot for the thin delicate kind, not the thick stuff that costs an arm and a leg and seems like something you could use to wallpaper your bathroom.

The accumulated result of all this is chaos in the RubberMaid wrapping bin. In honor of the stuff project, I decided to clean it out. This is what I am getting rid of: red polyester shiny fabric that is shaped too oddly to convert into present bags; Chinese take-out food containers that Jess gave me a few years ago filled with homemade granola, which are now disintegrating and unsuitable for regifting; cardboard ribbon spools empty of ribbon; old greeting cards and used envelopes that are covered with writing and unsuitable for gift tags; miscellaneous garbage, like gum wrappers, inkless pens and empty Scotch tape containers.

I also organized everything that remains. I put all the present bags together in a fabric bag, all the wrapping paper scraps and tissue in another fabric bag, tied spools of ribbon together with an elastic band, and neatly stacked the small jewelry boxes. The tape and scissors are tucked neatly in corner. The box will remain this way until someone else uses it, which will probably be the day after tomorrow.

For today, it's all good.

Countertop Scraps

Day 260: Countertop Scraps

These scraps are so small I will never
be able to use them. Next time the
counter gets damaged, we'll have to
replace the whole thing

So far, the only thing I've gotten rid of and regretted is fabric. Most of it I don't miss, but I should have kept the sturdy fabrics that I really like. Other than that, I have no regrets. So far.

Things I put into the give-away pile and took back out again:

(1) The off-white teapot with green vines that our au pair Nicole Hinkel bought after she'd broken the third teapot in a row. I put it in the pile because I haven't used it in years, it has no sentimental value and I have a blue willow teapot that I also haven't used in years. I took it back out because it (sort of) matches the desert rose china that belonged to my grandmother

(2) The Kitchenaid kitchen timer that came free with my stand mixer. I have a manual timer that I like much better, plus a timer on the microwave and another timer on the oven. I have never needed four timers at once and I generally don't like battery-operated things. I took it back out because it's high quality and Emma will be moving into an apartment in less than two years. I put it in again because I'd rather get Emma a really cute timer, like a tomato or a pig, but I took it back out because she'll need a lot of things and it would be nice to have a few things to hand down. (Another good reason for keeping the teapot.)

(3) A plastic zippered make-up bag, pink, with a lower-case "k" on the side. It is too small to be truly practical as a travel case. Although it's nice plastic, it's still plastic, and I don't really like plastic things. I took it back out because my next-door-neighbor Barbara gave it to me as a gift, and I like things that remind me of Barbara. Also, my niece Kaeli might like it. On the other hand, last time I tried to give Kaeli a little purse, she declined, telling me she was trying not to accumulate too much stuff.

(4) A giant stock pot that I use to sterilize canning jars. For the last couple of years I've just washed the jars in the dishwasher and put the jam in them hot. No one has gotten botulism yet. I'm not sure why I took it back out of the give-away pile now that I think of it.

Misto

Day 258: Misto

More from the spice cupboard: a Misto. Could be considered waste reducing, because it replaces disposal aerosol spray oils like Pam. Could be considered waste creating, because it stops working after a while and just sprays out a single messy stream of oil in an unpredictable direction, such that you shove it to the back of the cupboard, stop using it, and revert to good old-fashioned small pours of oil from the bottle directly into the pan, and why would anyone need Pam anyway?

Do you ever get tired from thinking so much? I do.

Pepper Grinder, Two Salt Shakers and No-Salt

Day 257: Pepper Grinder, Two Salt Shakers and No-Salt

More surprises in the cupboard, where I was rooting around looking for molasses to add to the slow-cooker beef ribs this morning. I would have said that our was not overstuffed with stuff 256 days ago. It's amazing how wealth plus space plus time equals lots of forgotten things tucked away in drawers, cubbies and shelves.

Two more of Barbara's items. If you'll recall, I promised Barbara when she moved - five years ago? six? - that I would take anything she couldn't quite part with, and either use it or give it away. Instead, I just shoved the items behind other similar items and forgot about them.

The No-Salt is a by-product of synchronized swimming. Emma drank so much Gatorade, I decided to try to make my own. Big mistake. Here are the ingredients:

Potassium Chloride , Potassium Bitartrate , Adipic Acid , Silicon Dioxide , Mineral Oil and Fumaric Acid

These ingredients taste absolutely nothing like salt. Their flavor most closely resembles the bitter aftertaste of saccharin. I wouldn't inflict No-Salt on anyone, so it's going in the garbage.

I can smell the ribs and soup bones in the CrockPot now, flavored with a little orange juice, molasses, onions, garlic, salt and pepper.

Clothesline and Clothes Pins

Day 256: Clothesline and Clothes Pins

Sun streaming through bright white sheets. The breeze making a line of shirts and pants dance, catching a woman's long dark hair, shaping her skirts to her slender legs. Children playing hide and seek amid sweet-smelling, clean laundry. A clothesline.

At the eco-resort where we stayed in Costa Rice, tourists were invited to hang their wet things on nature's clothes drier: hemp rope strung between cedar posts. What could be an easier way to reduce your environmental footprint than to let nature do the work? Isn't there something supremely absurd about using fossil fuels to perform osmosis?

In theory, yes. In fact, what could be more irritating than attaching 50 socks to a clothesline, returning four hours later and having to reattach them because the inside didn't get dry? What would more uncomfortable than stiff sheets off the line? What could be heavier than a laundry basket full of wet clothing? What could be more time consuming than waiting for laundry to dry? What could be more embarrassing than having your stained old bras and underwear visible to every passenger vehicle that drives down Packard Road? What could be more frustrating than a twisted and bent line that keeps sliding down the tree to which it's affixed, dipping your formerly clean clothing in leaf mold? And what could be easier than pivoting your torso to shift the clothes from the washer to the drier?

I comfort myself with the thought that hanging my clothes on the line will not buy the Earth and all its species one more minute, not unless my neighbors start doing it too. And their neighbors, and theirs, and theirs. I hung my clothes on the line for several years, and no one followed suit except Jess - and I'm guess she would have done so, with or without me.

Perhaps if I had a better set-up. A pulley system that would allow me to stand on the back porch and pull empty line towards me, so that I wouldn't have to move a step stool, for example. An apron full of clean new clothes pins. A secluded backyard.

But I have none of these things. All I have is this old clothesline, which fell to the ground a few days ago when our fence got knocked down in a wind storm. Will I pick it up, untangle it, sort out the broken clothes pins and start over? Or will it be one more casualty of the stuff project?

Need you ask?

Fish Wind Sock

Day 248: Fish Wind Sock
Our fish wind sock is a tiny little contributor to the trade deficit with China. We bought it on our first trip back to San Francisco after we moved to Ann Arbor. It has been a friendly placemaker on our front porch for many years, a point of reference and a bright spot. Such things aren't sturdy; one expect them eventually to become tattered and tossed away, like Kleenex in a pocket.

The U.S. Trade Overview by the Department of Commerce surprised me. I was surprised that the U.S. is the largest exporter of services in the world, and the second largest exporter of goods. The trade imbalance is improving. Exports comprise 30% of our GDP and support over 11M jobs. All that is quite different from the trade imbalance news that I'm accustomed to hearing, which generally pits the U.S. specifically against China. The U.S. Census, for example, reports the 2014 trade imbalance with China at $251B.

I am not an economic analyst, but all this raises a question in my mind about the usefulness of comparing two countries. Is international trade an arm wrestling match, with high stakes and a single winner? Or is it trick-or-treating, where the kids with the most motivation, the greatest speed and the latest curfew collect more candy, but everybody comes home with something in their plastic jack-o-lantern? No doubt, a smaller bucket of candy doesn't make a story.

Another interesting thing: the top three U.S. exports in 2013 were machinery, electronic equipment and mineral fuels. China's are electronic equipment, machinery and knit clothing. I picture shipping boats loaded with flat screen televisions passing each other in the Doldroms while the Chinese crank up the heat and Americans make do with warm sweaters.

Plastics ranks high on both the lists, and I suppose our nylon fish wind sock falls into that category. It's made of polymers anyway, just like plastics. I have often thought of Chinese factory workers making strange plastic items for export to the U.S. and other places. Now that I know plastics are big export items for both the U.S. and China, I'll need to expand my imagination to include U.S. assembly-line workers manufacturing little plastic bits that will disperse through the world like fireworks.

Speaking of which. Fourth of July fireworks may seem as American as the National Anthem, but 93% of our patriotic firecrackers are made in China.

Scissors

Day 236: Scissors

Bad scissors, plus a button
and PostIt flags

Scissors are ingenious. Exquisitely simple. Universally useful. Elegant. No household is complete without a pair, or several.

Did you know they were invented 1500 years ago in ancient Egypt? We can also thank the Egyptians for breathmints and toothpaste, door locks and bowling, written language and calendars.

I've unearthed many pairs of scissors over the past 231 days. Fabric Fiskars, kitchen shears, needlepoint scissors with a stork design, nail scissors, all-purpose shears, medical scissors (for removing stitches), wire cutters, pinking shears, pruning shears. Tiny little ones folded into a Swiss army knife. We use them all.

When Emma Jane was studying U.S. colonial history (and I was quizzing her), I learned that the typical colonial lived in abject poverty, struggling day-to-day to survive. They were not Charles and Caroline Ingalls, living independently, off the grid, like old-fashioned militant group members. Mental illness, harsh weather, low wages, alcoholism, poor health care, wage discrimination. Lack of tools. A pair of scissors like this would have been sharpened, and tightened, and wrapped in cloth, and kept safe.

In my house, when the kids were young, but old enough to use scissors on their own, scissors disappeared like potato chips. I tried keeping a pair in every drawer, but they would slip away like a fistful of dry sand.

Misplaced but not lost. They've been popping out of every bin and cupboard and shelf. I'm back to a pair in every drawer. This one single pair - with its too long, too loose blades and blunted tip - is the player who didn't get a seat when the music stopped.

I've been thinking lately about what a pleasure it has been, these past 16 years, to leave the chaos of my child-soaked house for the neat calm at my parents', every Sunday for family dinner. Everything has a place, and everything in its place. We are heading in that direction now. The part of me that reveled in the connected chaos of those warm little needy passionate rosy-cheeked metamorphosizing affirming little bits of life is a little sad.

But when I put down the computer and take out my needlepoint bag, I won't be sorry to find a pair of sharp scissors inside.

Papier Mache Face Sculpture, Kaya's Mat, Golf Ball, Foam Planet Earth and a Dinosaur Bone

Day 234: Papier Mache Face Sculpture, Kaya's Mat, Golf Ball, Foam Planet Earth and a Dinosaur Bone

Naturally, the papier mache face sculpture is the hardest of these to get rid of. All kid art is hard to get rid of, especially when your kids had Mrs. Higgins as their art teacher at Burns Park School. This little guy is in pretty bad shape, though; I'm not sure how much longer he's going to hold up. One of his horns is hanging by a thread. The papier mache is beginning to disintegrate. And the little triangle smile, while still friendly in its melancholy way, is coming off. I can't recall which kid made him, or of which brilliant art project he is the product, but I'm glad he's memorialized now. His picture has been published. He's got his 15 minutes of fame.

Kaya's mat can follow Kaya to my nieces' house, where all the American Girls are now residing. Kaya definitely had the coolest stuff, being a Nez Perce: the horse, the tipi, the leather mocossins, the ceramic fire. I'm sure she hasn't missed her sleeping mat. The girls have probably made something softer for her. She probably sleeps in a bed, with Kit and Samantha.

The golf ball and the foam planet earth can go in the Goodwill box.

The dinosaur bone can go in the garbage.

Garden Bed Map and Watercolor Pad

Day 230: Garden Bed Map and Watercolor Pad

 These two items are great examples of things that I've been holding onto because they might come in handy some day: vestiges of hobbies that have fallen by the wayside. How likely is it that I'll take up watercolors again? At best, I was a dabbler. A very shallow dabbler. The garden bed map is one of my little efficiency devices: with its little movable squares, I don't need to redraw the map every year, I can just move the squares around. (Even with a trowel in my hand I can't help but dream up business process improvements.) These things have been stored on our lovely built-in bookshelf for several years, annoying me by covering the pretty wood with clutter.

I am responsible for systematizing the stuff at two organizations whose primary function is to manage collections: an archive and a botanical garden. I've come to realize that the urge not to get rid of stuff-that-might-come-in-handy is almost inescapable, like the urge to turn your head and look at an accident on the freeway. It's one reason we have traffic jams.

In the midst of cleaning and organizing tools and supplies at the botanical gardens, the flat tires on the garden carts are getting replaced. Because, guess what? We found a box of replacement wheels!

Having too much stuff practically guarantees that the stuff you have won't come in handy. Instead, the stuff most likely to be useful - the stuff that should have been carefully selected to remain in your space, visible and accessible - is buried and forgotten. Just like that box of wheels got buried under a pile of broken tools and old microwaves.

The odds that I'll use this pad of watercolor paper and that garden map are pretty low. On the other hand, it's an absolute certainty that every Saturday morning while I'm drinking my coffee in my Edith Bunker chair, I'm going to see the garden map and the pad of paper cluttering up my nice bookshelf, and feel annoyed.

Except not this week.

This week, my shelf just got a little cleaner.

Shoelaces and Post-It's

Day 225: Shoelaces and Post-Its

Another example of the invisible obvious: shoelaces and Post-Its. They have been sitting in plain view on our credenza getting dusted for uncounted weeks.

Party Balloons and Crepe Paper

Day 224: Party Balloons and Crepe Paper

These were in the same small basket on the same small shelf with the hefe I got rid of last week. On the one hand, it feels like I'm drained dry: I have nothing left to give. On the other, I have an infinite amount of stuff, so much that unnecessary items - party decorations bought at the Dollar Store years ago for a party long finished - hide in plain view. 

I don't even see them. Invisible. 

More Tax Return Documentation

Day 217: More Tax Return Documentation

My fears are realized. Tax return documentation is lurking everywhere. It's on every shelf. In every binder. In every box. It's in the basement. It's near the computer. It's on the bottom shelf in the attic.

On second thought, maybe this is a good thing. 148 days to go. Tax return documentation might just make the goal attainable.

Chewbacca Doll, Matchbox Car, Flashlight, Phone Cord and Plastic Box

Day 214: Chewbacca Doll, Matchbox Car, Flashlight, Phone Cord and Plastic Box

I'm starting to notice the tiniest useless things these days. Things that wouldn't have warranted a blog post a hundred days ago. Things tucked away behind books or on top shelves. Unnoticed, forgotten, obsolete.

Yesterday, Rich made me promise that I would not get rid of any photographs. We've got two giant plastic boxes full of them, snapshots from the days before digital cameras. He says people love photographs. He says that if he had a pacemaker, I'd be eyeballing it, complaining that it's too squat and suggesting that someone else might get more value out of it than him.

What is the point of this project, now that I am running out of things to get rid of? I have a rule that says that everyone in the household has the right to refuse to get rid of anything they want. Sam can keep his hand puppets, and his Nerf guns and water pistols, his soccer balls and skim boards. Rich can keep his photographs, and his music gear.

I don't know what the next 152 days have in store. I may be just a little sorry for those heady days, months ago, when I gave away entire wheelbarrows full of electronics and cartons full of bedsheets. But I'm determined not to give up. I've already invested 213 days.

The funny thing is, though, that scraping the barrel is starting to make a difference in my daily life in a way that wheelbarrows never did. I ridiculed myself for the lameness of the KitchenAid owner's manual last week, but getting rid of that owner's manual has actually created more order than getting rid of the stack of owner's manual from the owner's manual file box in the more distant past. The KitchenAid owner's manual is so insignificant, I haven't really seen it since I placed it on that shelf. But now that it's gone, that little shelf is more orderly. It's easier to find the stuff I'm really looking for. When I reach into that shelf now, I get a little feeling of satisfaction. Yesterday, I framed a couple of lithographs, moved my mystery writer's teapot to the spot they'd been occupying, and made room on the little bookshelf below my mirror for lipstick and foundation. This morning when I put on my make-up, it was easy to see it, easy to apply it, easy to feel a frisson of pride for the work that went into making that little space more functional.

I liken it to getting your teeth cleaned at the dentist. Every day, you're brushing and flossing, freshening your breath and getting rid of the crumbs between your teeth. But at the dentist, they use  picks to scrape away the invisible tartar. It's a little uncomfortable, but at the end, your teeth feel clean. Really clean.

So that's what I'm doing now. Scraping tartar off my cupboards and shelves. I don't know if there are 153 more items to be scraped and cleaned away, and I'm resolved not to scrape away any enamel just for the sake of writing about it. But I'm eagerly awaiting that day when the entire property is clean, fresh and free of tartar. After that, who knows?

Floor Sprinkles

Day 203: Floor Sprinkles

It's damned lucky that I noticed this baggie of leftover sprinkles on the stairway windowsill as I was heading to the basement to put something away just now. If I hadn't, today would have been the day that I would have had to cry wolf. Today was the day the Wootenwoods Music & Nature Camp commitment and deposit was due from the Community High Jazz Band kids. I am the treasurer and responsible for collecting the forms and deposits. Oh, Sam dropped jazz band, but I didn't want to leave the director in the lurch. Did I mention that I also had eight hours of meetings today (and yesterday, and Tuesday, and Monday) and have been pinging between two organizations, one in a fever pitch of excitement over strategic planning and the other in grief?

I'm exhausted.

That's all.

Statements

Day 202: Statements

I've been working at the Bentley Historical Library for a couple months now, a place full of professionals with graduate degrees and decades of experience making decisions about which documents are worth keeping and which are not. I've learned that there are two broad categories of documents - archives, which have historical value, and records, which have business or operational value. If I work there another ten or twenty years, I may gain a deeper understanding of what I should and shouldn't be keeping from amongst the thousands of pieces of paper stuffed in boxes and file cabinets in my basement.

I'm not, by nature, a hoarder. My instinct is to get rid of everything. To dump the entire box in the recycling bin without even reviewing the content. But that would be unwise, and so I spent a couple hours going through the file cabinets and pulling out a few key records that I thought might be necessary someday.

I have not looked at anything within this box for any real world reason for over ten years. Everything that made the cut is a record of some fact from my life and which I believe may be needed at some point in the future. Our estate plan and living wills, of course. Tax returns. Home purchase documents from the house we live in now. Release of liens. Birth certificates.

What got culled: bank statements. Expired insurance policies. Old credit card statements. Social security statements. Other retirement account statements. College saving plan statements. Statements and statements. Ten years worth of statements.

So many statements that Rich had to take them to work in a garbage bag. He's been feeding them into the shredders in small batches all week.

With all the negatives about electronics, this is one positive: ream upon ream of paper, no longer necessary, because all these statements are now available on-line.

The bad news: the one document I do really need - an appraisal of our house from a few years ago, when we refinanced - was not in the box. Another example of the Case of the Purloined Letter: the snowstorm of paper hides the single flake.

Karl's Nostalgic Papers

Day 200: Karl's Nostalgic Papers

Pictures of Karl with Senga Carroll,
whose name is almost the opposite of his

I found an envelope full of my brother Karl's nostalgic papers in the same box as my own, equally musty and yellow. I considered depositing them directly into the recycling bin, thereby saving him the pangs (and asthma attack) of going through it himself. In the end, though, I decided that it's just not right to get rid of somebody else's stuff.

I couldn't resist taking a peek through it. Amazing how much more fun it is to look at your brother's memorabilia than it is to look at your own. My favorite was a stack of pictures of himself with Senga Carroll, the girl with the opposite name. If they had married, she might have been Senga Sikkenga. Or, he could have been Karl Carroll. 

Even these few snapshots are so seventies. The wide ties. The Farrah Fawcett 'do. My brother is hardly recognizable, with his slight build, smooth cheeks and full head of hair.  And yet, of course it's him.

His commencement booklet is modest compared to the one Emma got at the same school, 28 years later. Part of the escalation of acquisition that results in so much waste. No full page spread for each kid, just a long list with a few asterisks and footnotes to show who's on the honor roll and who got a varsity letter. A couple newspaper articles about his soccer team that make me nostalgic for the old Ann arbor News, back when it was a small town rag.

Here's hoping Karl has a happy walk down memory lane. I sure enjoyed it.