Life: 10 x 10

Thought I was done? So did I, but apparently I have more to share! Actually, you may regard this as the humbling cool-down stretch that must inevitably follow such triumphant horn-tooting.

First: a confession/realization. I am managing to make a dent in the presence of physical things in my life, but one look at my internet habits of late reveals that my mental habits are truly all of a flustery-whir. I am certainly a sucker for shiny, funny, informative and well-designed digital distractions of the photographic, listo-graphic and wordy sort that one may find in droves on the interwebz.

I’m pointing at you, Google Reader! Oh, help me! I’ve only had it for two days and have discovered that putting all of one’s webby distractions in one place makes them even more distracting! It used to be that I’d forget about this food-blog or that stupid-photo-blog for months on end until some random evening, when I’d suddenly remember it, surf on over an waste an hour or two reading back through all the posts I’d “missed.” One or two hours, that was it, and then I’d probably forget about it for another month or so. But now – ooooh now! As soon as I remember a blog I add it to my Reader, and after only two days of remembering and adding (and combing through Bookmarks, which are a whole ‘nuther fish for lightly sautéing) I now have enough blogs lined up that I need only wait around five, maybe ten minutes and BAM! – I suddenly have four new posts to read through. I could quite seriously sit around all day, being constantly fed some kind of entertainment/stimulation/information/curiosity from the shadowy, tentacled reaches of the blogosphere. I can feel their dark presence now, out there, somewhere in space, with some fanTAStic new lolcat to show me… Why, oh, why have I fallen into this trap? Because I am weak – no! Don’t spare me, friends. I am weak, indeed.

Secondly: penance.* In which I will try to streamline my internet absorbency, but will also administer myself a non-digital challenge, thus emphasizing the importance of promulgating** the wholesome benefits of Less to all corners of my life. Ironically, I discovered this challenge whilst distractedly perusing the blogosphere this afternoon. (.:ducks barrage of rotten tomatoes and cabbages:.)

I’ve long felt the absurdity of being a slave to products. I haven’t worn makeup since high school, except when I need it on stage. I haven’t worn perfume since high school either. In college I cut off all of my hair so that I wouldn’t have to bother with styling products. Also, for some time now, I’ve been increasingly bothered by what I’ve heard of the toxic contents of most commercial beauty products and how the FDA simply has no regulatory effect on any of them. Luckily, I found this website, by Skin Deep. It’s a database of nearly every product on the market rated according to it’s toxicity in several different categories (allergies, cancer, horomones, etc). Great! Now I have an easyish way to immediately sort through the beauty products that I have, regardless, accumulated in my makeup-free shorn-haired life.

But not only that, I also discovered these (what I consider) revolutionary concepts:
“Going ‘poo-less”
and
The Oil Cleansing Method

Never buying shampoo again? Yes Please!
Never buying face-wash again? Sign me up!
And here, the gauntlet is thrown down. I will try to adopt these methods of washing my hair and face naturally, thereby ridding myself of these plastic-bottled products – maybe for good!
Now, I’m simply not going to rewrite everything I’ve read from the above blogs (and the nearly two-dozen other blogs they led me to!) about natural hair- and face-washing. I will simply say this:
Read it. It sounds awesome. And I’m going to try it.

And yes, I will write to you about it after some period of time that I have yet to determine. Probably a few weeks, from the sounds of everyone else’s experiences.

So I guess the moral is to keep chugging; keep digging around in those grimy little corners of life in which I never even knew I was over-doing it; in which I could possibly save even a little more money and have one or two less things sitting around on a shelf or in a basket. There will always be more to cut back on, of course, but the key thing I’m striving for is balance. And if I try these new personal-care thingies maybe I can at least restore my pH balance…

Goals in summary:
-weed out the blogs, for the love of Pete
-simplify (and cheapify!) the beauty products

And now it its time for lunch.
~Angela

*by “penance” I guess I simply mean “beefing up my efforts,” since I think you’ll agree that this isn’t exactly a punishment.
**for Andrew, my personal spellcheck/thesaurus/dictionary with a pulse (and lovely hair).

I would like to take a moment to publicly commend my family (not that they read this, but here’s the thought counting). This past week or so we’ve all been going crazy over at my parents’ house ransacking the basement and getting rid of stuff – LOTS of it!

It all began with radon. Back before Christmas Andrew and I decided to have the basement at my parents’ house tested (we had been thinking of living in the basement and wanted to know just how big of a problem it had). We got a free kit from the state environmental program; used it, returned it, got the results back aaaand… turned out it had a major problem – over 13 times the normalish level of “problem” you want to shoot for. The problem was not only in the basement, but, being winter with everything tightly buttoned up, the problem had extended to the air on the first floor of the house. This prompted my parents to look into having a radon mitigation system installed – much faster than I’d ever imagined. And since someone is going to be tinkering in the basement anyway, they decided to actually, finally renovate that as well. After 15 years of fluffy pink insulation, there will be walls! a floor! sealed cracks under the floor! even rooms!

But like pretty much every basement everywhere – it was filled to the gills with stuff. Now I’m just not familiar with other people’s basements, other than knowing somehow that almost everyone’s contains the residual and transient stuff of life. I often have thought that no basement was as bad as ours, but now I’m pretty sure that that’s just not true. It’s mostly a hunch, since I have no evidence. I don’t go poking through other people’s sub-levels to see if they’re keeping the same bundle of afgans or the same scuba tank that we are, but I don’t feel too off the mark in guessing that yes, they probably are. I suppose the contents of one’s basement could be considered sacred information; the scattered tea-leaves that reveal subtle secrets of our personalities, insecurities, compulsions and fears. The things you never use, things you used once but probably never will use again, things you want to forget but don’t have the heart to throw away, things you think someone else can use, things you’re saving for the secret second life you hope to start some day, things you kept because you thought they’d be great for passing the time more meaningfully (and yet they’re down here and the TV’s upstairs) – these things are revealing. No wonder we’re so reluctant to actually wade through them. But this week, we did. We finally did.

And now Goodwill is either praising us for our contribution or cursing us and plotting the extra wing they’ll need to build to accommodate. Andrew and I got rid of well over half our clothing. We had four huge buckets plus the contents of a 9-drawer dresser and our duffle bags. I’m down to one bucket (summer and winter), and Andrew is down to one duffle bag for winter. (He is, naturally, waiting for summer to see what he will really use. I, on the other hand, remembered all too vividly which of those clothes didn’t fit last bathing suit season…) I got rid of sentimental things I never though I could, like Pookie, the teddy bear my grandparents gave me when I was six, or the heirloom set of china that was my grandma’s. (Note: the china is going to go to another family member. We weren’t pruning that recklessly.) All of Andrew’s and my possessions that were living in the basement have been culled and consolidated to fit quite nicely into just the closets of the room we stay in. My family went through seventeen (!!!) buckets of holiday decorations, mostly Christmas, and whittled it down to just four buckets for all the holidays.

Seventeen is indeed a huge number of buckets, and perhaps that number has impressed you already, but I feel the need to put this in just the right perspective for you: When I was little, holiday decorations were practically part of my education, and I first want to be very clear that I thoroughly enjoyed it as a kid. I feel like it gave us something of a sense of occasion and invited us to find reasons to celebrate life all year; the leprechauns, cupids and bunnies eventually diffusing into the simple joys and expectancies of the changing seasons and the appreciation of the transience of life. (Well, that came a little later but as a kid it was really just colorful and awesome.) My family has an impressive, and perhaps impassable, track record for the aesthetic onslaughts of Christmas and Halloween. At Christmas, our house was the North Pole, and my parents have been making Halloween haunted houses in their garages since before my brother and I were born. At Valentine’s Day it was like the Pink Truck had crashed into our house and on St. Patrick’s day it was like living in a Keebler elf tree in mythical Ireland. We decorated extensively for not only the big ones, but for all the “lesser” holidays as well. The ones where you might have a day off from school, but it’s not like hoards of family are coming to visit. I’m talking President’s Day, Columbus Day, Memorial Day – if it was on a calendar, we had things hanging on the walls, scattered on surfaces and clinging to the windows to match. Seventeen is the number of buckets that were left after we got rid of the lesser decorations – the Presidential portraits, the tiny models of the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria, the pilgrim salt & pepper shakers and “maps” of the “New World.” Once upon a time, seventeen buckets were the bare essentials.

But “bare essentials” has changed in definition around here, and I think we’re all getting a taste of the therapeutic benefits of letting go. I’m estimating roughly five or six sedan and/or pickup truck loads of stuff either has or will find its way to the thrift store, dump or recycling center. After a particularly productive Thursday, four of us took two massive carloads of things all at once to Goodwill (which has a fantastically convenient Donation Drive-Thru), then went down the street to see a movie to celebrate. Well done, fam. Well done.

The plans for the basement are humming along, and the contractors are scheduled to come in and begin tinkering within the next month or so. I recently went through the Googledoc spreadsheet that Andrew and I made to document exactly what we have in our storage unit, which box it is in, etc. I created another column and at the top I labeled it, coldly, ominously, in bold capitalized letters, “FATE.” I went through every thing and entered a preferred fate – throw out, donate, redistribute to family or friends, yardsale/consign, recycle, burn/shred, scan and then burn/shred etc. I was surprised at just how much I found I’m willing to part with.

And now, I’m absolutely itching to have a Spring Storage Unit Party. Simplifying your possessions isn’t actually simple. It can be grueling. It can be tedious. It can fill landfills. It can challenge your sense of duty to nostalgia.

I’ve personally found it to be pretty darn addicting.

I just wanted to share a little can-do encouragement/guidance with everyone:

Stop buying unnecessary things.
Toss half your stuff, learn contentedness.
Reduce half again.

List 4 essential things in your life,
stop doing non-essential things.
Do these essentials first each day, clear distractions
focus on each moment.

Let go of attachment to doing, having more.
Fall in love with less.

From: mnmlist

Hey there! Just wanted to do drop off a link for our trip to the Northwest:

http://therainiscalling.blogspot.com/

Happy New Year! Rather than make new resolutions, I’ve decided to scrutinize the ones I’ve accumulated over the past year. Matt and I are about to go on “vacation” (more on that later) for a week and this seems like a good time. It’s been about two months since my first blog post, and I find myself wanting to know where I stand. What have I accomplished since my initial, fiery resolve?

Shelter/Tumbleweed

We ran up against some obstacles, to say the least. The legal loopholes that usually allow for Tumbleweeds simply do not exist in New Hampshire. After a conversation with a very nice building inspector, I learned that it’s not just illegal to live in an “accessory structure” of less than a few hundred feet, but it is also illegal to live full-time in an RV. I suspect this has something to do our cold-weather climate mixed with NH’s generally high standard of living. As we work out a solution to this problem, we’ve resolved to move to a much smaller apartment when our current lease ends in June.

Finances

More importantly, however, Matt and I realized we simply can’t afford a house right now. Even a Tumbleweed. School loans put us in the red, which is a poor foundation for our new lifestyle. So after many a late-night conversation we decided to make debt our first priority. (I’m pretty sure we made an oath swearing off mortgages somewhere in there.) For us, this means delaying our dreams of part-time employment and spending the next few years earning our academic degrees all over again – this time in the financial sense. This may seem like a setback, but I believe the mental footwork is progress in the right direction.

Stuff

This is the category in which I shine. I’ve learned that it’s very easy to throw things away, but much harder to avoid the ever-vacuous landfill. I wince whenever I toss something in the trash. I’m not mad at myself for impulse-buys of the past, but I am a fan of atonement. This means a lot of cleaning, sorting and selling. A great number of books have gone to the local library. I’ve reduced the clothing I actually wear to about half of what it used to be. The other half is in stasis, but will soon be finding its way out the door. As for the knick knacks, the sentimental papers, and the “I’ll-get-to-it-someday-craft-supplies,” progress is slower, but apparent. I’m not getting rid of all of my high school papers/correspondences, but the vetting process has gotten a lot stricter. And many things are being scanned and gotten rid of.

Computers

Matt and I recently did the unthinkable. We decided to share a computer. Gasp! What?? Whoa, now, hold on there kiddies, don’t get carried away. We share a desktop. We still have one laptop each (er… in my case, a laptop and a netbook). But it’s better than it used to be. At our peak, we had no less than 7 computers in the apartment. And yes, I realize this is absolutely ridiculous.

It wasn’t like we bought the latest and greatest every few months. It came from an inability to get rid of the old. I mean, what if I need an extra computer? Or what if my still-functioning Windows 3.11 laptop is worth something some day? These were the anxieties that kept them close, move after move. And we haven’t completely fixed the problem… yet. Most of them are still sitting around collecting dust. But slowly, we’re finding responsible ways to dispose/disperse. We’d like to get it down to three total. One desktop to share for intensive tasks and one laptop each so we can both read/write at the same time. It still sounds excessive, I know… but we’ll re-evaluate the situation when we get there.

Exercise

I’d give myself an “E” for effort here. Or maybe an “E minus” for feeling the urge to make an effort. I went to the gym one morning in November when I couldn’t sleep. We recently set up our DDR pads and played for about a week… and then… fail. The end-of-year crunch at work put an end to that regimen, but hopefully we can rectify this situation soon.

Food

Yay, another thing we’ve been good at… mostly. Though exercise is lacking, our diet has seriously improved. We recently… acquired… a GABA rice maker. OK fine, so we bought a new thing. No, I do not regret it. Check out the health benefits here, here and here. Plus, we can throw in rice before work and come home to a delicious dinner, making us that much more likely to eat something that’s good for us.

In general, we’ve been aiming for a higher-fiber diet with lots of grains and veggies while phasing out large portions of meat, sugars and salts. When we do buy animal products, we try to find them ethically-raised. A-Market is a wonderful source, but the ethical and natural trends are finding their roots even in the mainstream grocery stores.

We were eating lots of fish, but we’ve had to belay that habit for reasons I will explain in another blog post. All in all, I feel our diets are improving.

Conclusion

Not bad at all. I’m feeling very inspired about getting rid of things, so I’m going to ride that wave for now. Hopefully vacation will be a jump-start to our pitiful exercise routine. But I’m not worried about reaching my goals instantaneously. As long as progress is made, I’m happy. And heaven save me from the day that I’ve reached the end of all my goals with nothing left to strive for.

Found this blogger mnmlist through his other blog, Zen Habits. Not only is his site layout itself perhaps the epitome of zen (well, just short of a single blank page with only a haiku and tasteful cherry blossom branch arrangement), but the minimalism reaches right down to his urls, which are free of the ever-cluttering and obnoxious-to-type “www.”

I like one of his more recent posts called “Learn to love less.” Now if you didn’t understand the context this would sound fairly grumpy, antisocial, maybe even heartless, but its not. As with another post on learning to eat less, its a reminder of a very powerful factor that we have to fight against in pursuing the kind of downsized lifestyle the four of us are blogging about: strong emotional bonds most of us have programed into certain physical stimuli. We so easily confuse need with want, and want with love. It’s better to care for more, right? To want more? Why would you want to love less? This holiday season we’ve just survived has highlighted these bonds for me with sizzling neon lights, it seems.

But first, flash back to August of this year, or even to an earlier post on this blog. I remember very heatedly venting to Andrew – perhaps as we sped down 101A at five in the morning to return our UHaul before the 7am limit we’d laughed at possibly exceeding – that I never in my capitalized LIFE wanted to receive another thing. No more knick-knacks or anything like stuff ever again. This year, I proclaimed through sleep deprivation and hunger pains, I would insist – sohelpmegod! – that birthday and Christmas presents could only be some sort of digestible and disappear-able good or money for an IRA or some such thing. No more! Nyet! Never again! Yo ho, yo ho, the tiny life for me!

And yet, fast-forward to this December: my mother demands a Christmas list. She says its to prevent her from getting me meaningless stuff – and she’s right! But why get someone “stuff” anyway? Is it an insult to say “no, I don’t want you to get me anything?” Is that worse than giving her a list with maybe only one thing on it? I did give her a list that was not unreasonable (I said “pick one or two” and even included a “just $ for an IRA” line!), but it certainly was not the kind of wishlist that I swore to in August. But no matter what kinds of lists my brother and I may have written, there was indeed a small Mountain of Stuff on Christmas morning – a younger cousin of the mountain we have sitting in a storage unit on route 13.

So – why need a Mountain? Even if people can talk about giving more meaningful presents or accumulating less clutter, they still panic – or something – and revert to the comforting habit of furnishing their loved ones with a Mountain. That aesthetic high of seeing all that glittering, glistening magic, of knowing that you’ve lavished your family with stuff always wins out. I know my house is not the only place this happens. I think that deep down most of us can’t shake that old conditioning, perhaps a relic of some kind of collective Manifest-Destiny/can-do/Americana/consumerist-push-for-moredammit! mentality, that giving less (regardless of the receiver’s receiving capabilities) is loving less, and “loving less” is heartless. Grinchy, even.

It’s like a chemical dependency. And during the holiday season its like dodging hordes of junkies, racing through the mall picking up every odd-looking flashlight or novelty-print deck of playing cards that will make them feel like they are satisfying their loved ones.* The fact is that this is better off done with actual love, but since we can’t always make a suitably tactile Mountain of that under the tree**, none of us, in our super-catologued, quantified, meme-listed and cyber-nourished modes of discourse, seems to believe that we already have satisfyingly-sized supplies aplenty. And so, onward with the weird flashlights and novelty bits!

Christmas is very much like super-floor-show time for a tendency that actually affects us year round, Christmas-celebrator or no: more is better, and if you have or give (or want or love) less, you’re inadequate. Will my family ever be able to handle giving one, single, meaningful, tasteful gift each? Can we stand only spending fifteen minutes unwrapping the entirety of our Christmas? I think so. Some day. Some glorious, minimalist day.

Now as for holiday eating… that’s perhaps for another decade.
~Angela

*Note: Names have been changed to protect the innocent. I did not actually receive a novelty flashlight or card deck of any sort this year
**You gutter-mind, you.

I wanted to post a link to a blog I just discovered:

http://blendedlifestyle.blogspot.com/

From the About blurb:

“I yearn for a rural lifestyle, getting earth under my fingernails and putting funny-looking delicious veg straight from the earth onto the table. I’d like to get my honey from bee hives rather than squeezy bottles, my milk, yoghurt and cheese from a goat rather than plastic packets that I throw away.

I also love my laptop, my work, my feeling of being plugged into the city.

I am trying to find my way towards a lifestyle that blends self sufficiency with participation in the formal economy. The blog comes with me all the way.”

I’ve wanted to simplify my life mainly for personal sanity reasons. But, obviously, there are good social sanity reasons to adopt a tinier lifestyle.

Katy has been talking about reducing use of dishes here and here. As vagabonds, flitting from place to place, Angela and I have found it expedient to carry our personal mugs along with us. Mine gets washed after every use (often just rinsed and put away).

This has been helping me notice (be conscious of) what and how much I am drinking, because I have to wash the substance out of my mug every time, rather than pulling a fresh mug/glass from the cupboard. In this way I’m improving my own health (I drink less coffee/tea and more raw milk now). Great for me! But I’m also saving energy in general by giving my mug the full wash (soap and hot water) less often.

Glenn Campbell posted on Friday about Wal-Mart, and speculated that buying less is definitely helpful, even if what you are buying isn’t highest quality (fair-trade, organic, local, etc):

“If I buy something, it is because I truly need it and will use it well, not because it serves my vanity. I don’t know if I am helping or hurting world society, but at least I am treading lightly through it.”

I try not to shop at “Acme” (Wal-Mart, in Glenn’s parlance). I try to buy local > organic > “natural.” These changes in lifestyle are good, but buying lots of local/organic stuff can get expensive (personally and socially).

So here’s my new personal maxim: Use less first, then use stuff as local/organic as you can afford.

A nice side effect of buying less is that you’ll be able to afford a greater percentage of better stuff!

My new dish rack!!!

Told you I’d do it.

Gonna add hooks to the frame later so we can hang our teacups and cooking implements. But for now… bed.

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Stupid dishes. How I hate them and their affinity for piling up and smelling bad.

So, on the advice of Glenn Campbell, we’re tossing over half of our dishes into “storage” (a.k.a. boxes in the closet) and NOT using our dishwasher. We will keep some extras around for the purpose of feeding our friends. But we think the wash-as-you-go idea has a lot of merit. Just requires a little discipline.

This one is really cool, but at $498, a bit too expensive for us.

I’ve also been doing some hunting for wall-mounted dish racks. I’d really like one that hangs over the sink – that way, when you set the dishes in to dry, you’re also putting them away. Here are some neat ones from Apartment Therapy.

Two problems: 1) They’re notoriously hard to find/kinda expensive. 2) We can’t mount things on our apartment drywall.

So, I’m thinking of building a free-standing frame to hold a regular dish drainer instead. If it works, I’ll include instructions on our soon-to-debut wiki.

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