Stuff... and having less of it

It's been building up for years now, gradually, but recently more quickly: the desire to have less stuff. Of course, it's always competing with the desire to get more stuff: new cell phones, an e-reader, home decor items, kitchen gadgets, clothing, jewelry, craft supplies...the list of things I want to get is pretty much endless.

A bunch of things over the years, and a few things pretty recently, have kept the idea of living with less (and being happier as a result) in my mind, sometimes in the background, but more and more often coming to the forefront and presenting itself as quite possibly the best and first solution to being a happier, healthier, less stressed and more financially stable person.

A few years ago, I heard about my cousin's brother-in-law giving away a lot of his stuff. I also heard about Tiny Houses for the first time, and they've been popping up from various sources ever since, including just today when a blog post linked me to the Tiny House Blog and this recently hand-built trailer that just looks so, so cool to me. I wish I was the kind of person who had the desire and the discipline to simplify my life so much that I could live in a tiny house, but I know I am not that person, and I never will be; however, I think I am the kind of person who can learn to recognize what stuff I want to get that will actually improve my life and bring me joy, and what stuff will just take up space in my home and in my brain and add stress to my life, taking more than it is giving.

In addition to my recent reminder of tiny houses, a bunch of other things have me contemplating all my stuff and how much of it I don't need or want, including but not limited to:

• My very good friend @kellypens is giving one thing to charity for every day of Lent this year.  If this beautiful mom of 2 who is also in school full-time, in campus housing with her family of 4, living on one income (her hubby's) can give 40 things to charity, how much could I give away?
• Paul started working on the "finished" half of the basement yesterday, ripping up (old, hideously orange) carpet and scraping up the bits of padding stuck to the cement.  We need to drylock the walls, fix a crack in the cement floor, and paint the floor so that it can eventually be a cozy office/TV/playroom.  This has me thinking about the boxes and boxes of stuff stacked in the unfinished half of the basement, full of things that haven't seen the light of day in years.  Some of them have moved with me from college to Virginia, back to PA to our apartment in New Cumberland, and now to our house that we own and plan to live in for the next 5 to 10 years; some of it has lived in my parents' basement until we bought this house, at which point my dad dropped it off on our carport, and we dumped it unceremoniously in our basement.  Yes, a lot of this stuff has years of nostalgia attached to it, stretching back to my childhood...but it's in a box. In my basement. Taking up space. If I don't do something now, its most likely future is to continue to take up space in a box until we move to another house, where it will then continue to take up space in a box until I grow old and die and my offspring are forced to pay some robot from the year 2075 to haul it to the landfill on the dark side of the moon.  With a future like that, what good is nostalgia doing me?
• On a related note, I have been thinking quite a lot lately about my future offspring, as you are almost certainly aware if you have ever met me.  One thing that has occurred to me, and keeps occurring to me, is that the rate of growth of the amount of stuff we own is going to increase exponentially once we have a baby.  I've seen it happen to my friends and cousin:  when you have a baby, people give you stuff.  LOTS of stuff.  So if I figure I could get rid of half the stuff currently sitting in my basement, but I don't do it now, then it seems to me that a year from now (at which point I am really hoping to have a baby, or at least be anticipating the arrival of one) my job will be, like, twenty times more difficult, and by 5 years from now it will be so insurmountable that I'll never be able to do it.  So basically, these last few months before I'm expecting are my last chance to learn the art of keeping my stuff in check.
• My wonderful and talented sister got a job.  She will be moving into her first solo apartment, and since she's the younger sister and I did the whole living-on-my-own-for-the-first-time thing back in 2005, guess what?  I got a lot of the extra stuff my parents had to give me.  Well, now she needs it, which means Paul and I need to dig through some of the aforementioned boxes in the basement and collect all the extra things that she now needs to eat off of and cook with and sit on in her new apartment.  And if I'm going to be doing all that work anyway, and getting rid of some stuff in the bargain, I might as well keep going and get rid of more things than just the stuff Hannah will need!
• I also have had a few semi-related experiences surrounding church, Camp Nawakwa, and my tenure on Trinity's senior pastor call committee that have really gotten me thinking about stewardship, not just in terms of me giving money to the church or camp, but in terms of how I manage my own possessions because of how that impacts my ability to give my time and money to the church over the course of the rest of my life.  I need to get my stewardship of myself and my house in order so that I can be a better steward in the world.

Part of succeeding in my goal of not owning anything that doesn't make my life better is thinking all these things and coming to these conclusions about what I want to do, but an even bigger part is holding on to the motivation all these thoughts have given me, and being able to re-motivate myself day after day over the many weeks and months it's going to take to actually get rid of all my extraneous stuff.  It's hard work!  I told Paul what I wanted to start this weekend, and that my two main areas of focus were going to be the basement and the office (our 3rd bedroom, the smallest, is currently an office, but has actually become more of a dumping ground for papers and random items that aren't suitable for basement storage but aren't in daily use that we want to keep out of the way.  It's basically a disaster zone of mess in here.), and Paul suggested (and I agreed) that the basement was the best place to start.  But then Paul made plans to go hang out with our friend Matt tonight, and while I didn't want to waste my current level of motivation, I also didn't fancy the idea of being alone in the cold, dimly-lit basement on a Friday night, so I decided to unleash my energy on the office instead, where I could at least play some The Daily Show reruns from the last week on the computer while I worked.  Well, aside from writing this blog post, I spent the entire evening (about three and a half hours) going through boxes and shelves and desks in the office, and it's still pretty much a disaster zone.  That might have de-motivated me a bit, except that I produced two small boxes of stuff to get rid of, a medium-sized bag of trash, and a medium-large bag of recycleables.  I freed up space in multiple storage boxes, including three plastic boxes that I can now use to organize our messy linen closet (it is nearly impossible to keep all those pill bottles, band-aid boxes, cleaners, and hygiene products organized!!)  I also found our missing safe deposit box key!  We had one of the two, which is all you need to access your stuff, but we haven't been able to close out our box in New Cumberland and move it to the bank near our house because we only had one of the two keys.  Now we can make the move!

Tomorrow evening and Sunday afternoon I plan to continue with my purge and re-organization, moving to the basement as soon as the office is slightly more tidy.  I feel like the motivation is here to stay, for a while at least, and I am hoping that my friends and family will read this post and talk about it with me, which will help me stay motivated as well.  And that brings me to the final and most important part of achieving this goal, to own only good things:  YOU.  If you are reading this, I need you to support me!  That means telling me when you hear stories about other people who are doing similar things, stories about things you might be doing, tips of people who need the kind of stuff I am getting rid of, and just general encouragement.  And it means one more really BIG thing: NOT giving us any more stuff.  Ever, for any reason.  At least, not until it's stuff related to our impending parenthood, since I doubt anything could prevent my mom, sister, aunts, or in-laws from buying stuff for their future grandbaby/niecephew.  This means when I turn 28 at the end of May, I do not want any birthday presents.  When our anniversary rolls around in September, nothing then either!  If you are walking through a really awesome flea market and something totally unique and wonderful catches your eye and you think, wow, Paul and Mer would really love that, I am asking you to just share it with us in words, but not give it to us.  If you are at some store's going out of business sale, and you see the most amazing deal on an item that you think we could use, remind yourself that a $10 item that we are currently living perfectly happily without, even if it originally cost $90, does not make it any less true that we do not need that item, and NOT buying it will cost even less--ZERO dollars!  Plus it will take up zero space in our house!  In this same spirit, I am planning to extend our Christmas gift-giving strategy to the rest of this year and beyond: we will be giving homemade food or other homemade items only when there is any occasion to give a gift.  The only other thing I can think of that fits the bill is a charitable donation in honor of the giftee; my favorite charity pick at this time would be to Camp Nawakwa to help pay off the land they purchased in 2008, and I hope you all will share your favorite charity causes with me.

All of this doesn't mean we won't be buying any material goods for ourselves.  I am planning to purchase a new purse soon, because my current one is falling apart after 18 months of continuous use; Paul and I are also considering purchasing an internet-capable bluray player in the fall so that we can cancel our Netflix subscription and get our streaming video via Amazon Prime.  If Paul can sell his motorcycle for a high enough price this Spring, we might use that money to buy a new MacBook, since we haven't had a truly up-to-date computer in the house in years.  The idea is to get rid of more things than we're purchasing, so that we have a net decrease in the amount of stuff we own; to purchase fewer things going forward; and to learn to only purchase items that we know will make our lives better, whether through practicality, functionality, or just plain enjoyment, but not things that we will relegate to a messy corner of the office or a box in the basement within a few weeks once the novelty wears off.  And if we can learn to do this and keep doing it, eventually we will now own any things beyond what we need to be the happiest versions of ourselves.  Can you imagine life without that nagging stress of knowing you really need to clean out the basement and re-organize the office and the kitchen??  Wouldn't that be awesome?

And that's the story of my latest, dearest ambition.

Plans

Wow you guys.  I have been a horrible blogger.  Never even posted the second half of our big vacation!  Well, that will have to wait a bit longer, because right now I am at work waiting for queries to run and reports to download, and need to do something that won't add additional strain to my CPU: blogging!
I have a LOT of things in progress and just itching to get started at home.  Big and small, crafty and home-improvement-y, take a look:

Things I am currently actually in the middle of and plan to finish in the near future:
 - Crocheted shoes (which I made into boots) at the request of Mindy for Norah - just need to add buttons!  Think Paul will be willing to stop by JoAnn Fabrics on our way home this afternoon?
 UPDATE:  I finished Norah's boots!  See for yourself:

 - A gift for another soon-to-arrive baby, not saying what in case Kelly reads this :-)
 - Hang already-framed pictures in the living room

Projects I have mostly prepped for and am hoping to actually do in the not-too-distant future, like maybe during a few of my days off around Christmas:
 - Painting the vanity in the 2nd bathroom to cover up the hideous white-streaked-with-gold fake marble laimate
 - Painting the ceiling (blue) and walls (green) of the 2nd bedroom/future nursery
 - Painting the bookcase and side table that live in the 2nd bedroom
 - Using leftover paint samples to paint the canvas for some cheap coordinating art for the 2nd bedroom
 - Re-pot some houseplants that are in sore need of it and find a new spot for the peace lily, which is looking sad and hasn't bloomed in ages
 - Make some cool canned things to give away as Christmas presents
 - Bake various cookies (same purpose as previous bullet)
 - Get started on that knit onesie pattern I bought on Etsy

Other things I want to do soon, like before the holidays:
 - Decorate inside and out for the holidays
 - Purchase a living tree to be our Christmas tree for this and the next few years, until it gets too big.  This project also includes finding/creating an appropriately decorative pot for the tree to live in.  Maybe something big and square that I could cover to look like a Christmas present, so my tree would look like it is sitting on top of the biggest present under it?  That would be cool.

Other projects I have in mind but probably won't get to until next year (hopefully early next year!):
 - Make a tufted upholstered headboard for the 2nd bedroom
 - Re-upholster the diningroom chairs
 - Attempt the more-complicated re-upholstering of the awesome retro chair we got from Poppy.  It is currently covered with dark orange plasticy fake leather that is cracked and old-looking.  The color is actually perfect, but I want to go with something new and maybe slightly more modern-looking.
 - Finally sort through and get rid of a lot of the old junk in our basement to make way for inevitable future accumulation

What about you?  What non-every-day things are on your actual and hopeful to-do lists?

So Far

We're on vacation!

So far, our road trip has taken us from home, where we made salsa to use up veggies from the garden the day before we left:

 to Harriman, NY, where we hiked to the top of a mountain:

to NYC, where we visited some museums, Central Park, and Times Square:

to Boston, where we hiked the Freedom Trail all day and topped off our best day yet by meeting for dinner and drinks with Wes, Stephen, and Shaina:

Next we headed to Fort Ticonderoga, where we slept in a decent hotel for the first time, even though we checked out less than 12 hours after we checked in!  The Fort was great, but my favorite part was the King's Garden:

And today we arrived in Colchester, a suburb north of Burlington, near Lake Champlain.  The trip hear was cool, from Defiance Mountain overlooking Fort Ticonderoga, to some amazing views of the Vermont countryside with distant mountains and picture-perfect clouds:

We'll be here by Lake Champlain for our longest stretch yet, 3 nights, before heading to Montreal for 4 nights.  After that we'll spend one night somewhere along the way home.  For now, we're planning to take it very easy tomorrow and give our feet a much-needed rest by renting a canoe for the day and just drifting lazily around the lake.

Garden is planted!

Before we start in on the garden, observe my de-barked dog barking:


Isn't she cute?  She still only does it in that part of the yard, when I'm not too close by.  She was outside with me all day while I planted the rest of the garden, from about 10:00 AM until 3:00 or so, and she barked on and off for the first hour or so, then forgot about it for most of the day, then barked a few more times in the afternoon, then curled up in a ball and napped until I took her inside.

On to gardening!  It took me all day Saturday, but the garden is now completely planted.  Nothing left for me to do but water, weed, and wait...and maybe put up a fence if the bunnies get to be a nuisance.  And hopefully harvest, you know, eventually.

Speaking of harvesting, one of the tomatoes has two flowers, one of the pepper plants has a few fruits starting to form, and we are going to need to use some basil every week if we want to keep it from flowering! In the slide show you can see the lemon basil I planted already had flowers, so I cut all those off, and we'll wait a bit to harvest from that one.



In other news, this was the week of the mail-order shopping deliveries: we got the slipcovers we ordered from Bemz for our Ikea Tullsta chairs; I got the sandals I ordered: Teva Women's Mandalyn Ola Wedge Flip Flop, but I'm sending them back because they're too small; I got a replacement for my Nook because the page-turn button cracked on mine (it's a common problem), and I'm shipping the other one back; and I sold my copy of The Lost Symbol on Amazon now that I and everyone who wanted to borrow it is done. That was my first time ever selling anything on Amazon, and it was pretty great! I priced it the cheapest of the "like new" used copies, and it sold in less than 24 hours! I have the shipping label printed and it's boxed up and ready to ship, so tomorrow after work I will be stopping at the post office to ship the book and return my sandals, and at UPS to ship back my cracked Nook. Then there will be no more major purchases for us for a while!

Hopefully by next weekend there will be one or two sprouts from the seeds I planted too - wildflowers, lavender, hyssop, sunflowers, leeks, spinach, and pole beans. The only thing with no edible properties are the wildflowers, but if those come up (the seed packet is 2 years old) I will cut them and have fresh flowers inside all the time.

So chapter 1 of our gardening adventure is over...hopefully some interesting and encouraging growth will be visible over the next few weeks!

Juno Speaks

While I was gardening yesterday evening, I had Juno in her harness attached to our clothesline in the backyard so she could hang out outside with me.  I've been using this setup frequently since last Saturday, and she's getting used to it and obviously enjoys it -- she even figures out how to unwind herself pretty quickly if she gets her leash wrapped around a pole.  It's a good setup.

You should also know, if you don't already, that Juno is debarked.  She already was when we got her - the puppy mill that raised her and bred her must have done it to all their dogs that they weren't planning to sell.  It means they surgically cut her vocal cords, and many people consider it cruel.  Most dogs can still bark afterwards, just much more softly -- it sounds like a hoarse or whispered bark.  Juno has never made a peep, so we assumed she couldn't, and we've always wondered if her inability to bark was part of the reason for her extreme timidity.

Well, last night, Juno remembered how to bark.  She was on the opposite side of the yard from me, with her nose pointed challengingly towards the side yard and the street, barking like it was something she did every day.  I could hear her clearly from the garden, but it wasn't until I looked at her and saw her barking that I realized what it was.  She stopped when I said "Juno!  You're barking!" but she started up again a few minutes later, and again after Paul came out to hear for himself.

She was back to her usual silent self all evening, but this morning I clipped her to the clothesline again while I watered the tomatoes, and after a few minutes she went back to the same spot, pointed her nose in the same direction, and practiced barking some more!  This time I noticed that, while she's barking, her tail actually wags from side to side like a normal dog's -- something else we really haven't ever seen her do.  A few months ago when she met a friendly bulldog I thought I saw her tail wag one time, but since it stopped immediately I couldn't be sure.  So now all at once, it seems our little Juno has figured out how to wag her tail and bark.

Now that she's maybe starting to come out of her shell a bit, we will see more of the Juno we saw on Easter Sunday and I can get some more pictures like this one, where she isn't curled up into a sad and pathetic little ball!

I'm hoping to get a picture or video of her barking tomorrow evening or Saturday while I'm out planting the rest of our garden, so stay tuned for that, and for the next garden update I hope to post on Saturday evening or Sunday afternoon!