psocoptera

It's the 19th and I last posted on Disadvent 12, having skipped 9, 10, and 11. So, uh, not a huge amount of momentum at this time. I have done some disadventing here and there - I delivered some gifts, I dropped off an Amazon return, I took some clothes to textile recycling and to the library kid-stuff resale shop, and I took a couple of carloads to the storage unit, which continues to not exactly be disadvent but to overlap significantly. Like, packing basement books and CDs means actually starting to reduce some of the mountain of boxes I've been accumulating for this purpose. *Feels* disadventy.

I've also identified a few more books to suggest for discard instead of packing - stuff that's still in print and doesn't have sentimental associations. I think Jb is a little bit like "why these and not others, why bother if it's just a few here and there and not a substantial reduction", but my feeling is that even if we only get rid of one in twenty, or one in fifty, or one in a hundred, that's still something, like, every book we don't have to pack is something? But it's also much faster just to pack things than to think about them, or to set aside to ask Jb about. Although I can skip that last part by just focusing on culling my own books. But I still have to do my own emotional processing there. It's probably time for another reduction of stuff from college, like, a) if I ever was going to want to reread the Nicomachean Ethics or Communist Manifesto or whatever, I would probably read it online or in a nice library ebook rather than in my old paper copy with my old highlighting and margin notes, and b) realistically, am I ever going to reread the Nicomachean Ethics? Of all the thousands of books in the world that I might like to read, I don't think that is where I would turn for comfort or guidance or inspiration, much less entertainment? So, I guess that's the biggest disadventure I've been on, working through those feelings and getting ready to make more progress there.

A bag of Jh's outgrown/unwanted clothes to Goodwill, and a handoff of a bin of my GMIL's photo albums to my MIL. (I ended up with a bunch of GMIL's stuff for logistical reasons, and then the fire derailed things...)

I think I concluded last year that the holiday-baking-mailing-to-relatives did count; certainly the part of it where I get to get out the stashes of small and medium takeout containers I build up all year and finally use them. Anyways that was the big project Tues and yesterday. (I don't do the actual baking, that's Jb and the kids, but I do the pan-to-post-office part.)

Similarly, my ability to focus time/energy on disadventure is being somewhat sapped by two overlapping/competing projects, the cleaning of the house of routine clutter, which has become urgent, and the desire to keep making progress on packing and moving the entire contents of our basement to a storage unit as a first step in maybe finally getting someone in to do something about the water problem. (It's been so dry we haven't actually had a leak in many months but that will change whenever we finally get heavy rain/snow again.) There's a certain amount of stuff in the basement that *could* perhaps be disadvented but it's hard to figure out how much time to sink into that vs just mindlessly packing and moving stuff. Also my house is very full of cardboard boxes I've been saving up for exactly this, and successfully deploying them for packing would clear out way more space in living areas than pretty much any other disadventing possibly could. (What's in the basement is basically "everything we owned before the fire that couldn't be cleaned" - books, games, art and decorative stuff, nostalgia and papers, CDs and DVDs. And, like, the books have been through a couple of culling passes - we got rid of a lot right after the fire, and the first big basement flood took out a bunch more - but maybe there's also, like, decorative stuff we're never going to display again, that we don't need to keep forever in a box? Or maybe we could do yet another pass on the books as our sense of what we still care about evolves?)

While planning some holiday baking we discovered our can of canned pumpkin was a couple years expired, so for the second day of disadvent I went looking for other old or expired stuff on the shelves. I know that in theory many canned goods will stay safe long past those dates, but a) it freaks out one of the kids in particular, and b) I'm less sure about stuff in plastic bags or those plastic-foil packets, and c) while every wasted food is A Failure, we can certainly afford to not use this stuff and it's not crazy to have some budget for wrong guesses about what would get used. (Also some of it is tricky because I'd like to have a few things as emergency supplies that don't get used in anything my kids will eat, and I just don't have the energy any more to cook two dinners and wash two sets of cookware, but then I'm deliberately repeatedly wasting the replacements, bleah.) Anyways, I managed to fight the urge to immediately replace all of it, and also found some old opened hard candy of indeterminate age and unappetizing appearance (I think it's been *several* years since I bought any Valentine's conversation hearts), so that's something.

ETA: I'm amused to realize I made basically this identical post in last year's Disadvent. I guess my challenge for next year is to cull the pantry without feeling defensive about it. :/

A day or two after my parents had left and life started returning to normal, J came to me and said he had realized that there probably wasn't going to be more Disadvent because Advent was over, but, he said rather hopefully, maybe there was going to be Disepiphany? In my family tradition Epiphany is already sort of Disepiphany because it's the day you take down the tree. But Disepiphany is a great word and clearly needed to be celebrated. So for Disepiphany Weekend I went through four shelves of the small miscellaneous-stuff bookcase, and the entire box of unusual objects, and somehow it looks like there's just as much stuff in all of them as before but also there's a whole bunch of stuff in the trash and recycling, so I must be doing something. And I suppose I'll keep doing as much as I can over the weekend, although other J is having a friend overnight and is very concerned that the house look as clean and orderly as possible (which is not very, but at least I can avoid being in the middle of sorting through things).

A bag of unused small craft kits and craft supplies like leftover perler beads and perler pegboards to a Buy Nothing person, and also threw in the solar rover robot, which Q had mentioned very much wanting to go to a person. Buy Nothing person is apparently facing winter break with three kids so if something in that bag can keep someone busy for a few minutes that's a lot more use than any of it was being here.

Notable things found while going through craft supplies: *so many* temporary tattoos. I could do full sleeves, easily. I mean, I'm not going to, because it's cold, and they'd be so gross when they were all peeling off, and I don't really want to be covered in Star Wars or Frozen iconography (the dinosaurs or mixed lot of random cool stuff, maybe - there are some dragonflies and mantises I might keep for myself for when it's bare-arms season again, I might enjoy having a little dragonfly on my arm somewhere). Probably a future Buy Nothing offer.

No disadvent yesterday, I was, a bit ironically, too busy getting things ready to leave my house. (I feel like holiday mailing isn't really quite the spirit of disadvent. Although I suppose I do stash takeout containers all year for packing up the baked-goods-for-relatives part of the mailing, and it's exciting to get to get them out and deploy them and find out if I saved the right sizes and quantities, so maybe that does count.)

Anyways, today I am counting a hand-me-down rain jacket with a flaking lining. Probably I should have gotten rid of that thing ages ago, before it had one more chance this morning to shed tiny nylon dandruff all over my clothes, the front hall, and the car I had just cleaned a few days ago, but now was clearly the best time remaining. (Except, ugh, I was going to throw it out, but maybe by law it has to go to textile recycling? So I have to go dry it out in the basement so that it's dry enough to go in the bin? Blaaah. Is "I feel sorry for whoever has to process it" a legal justification for putting it in the trash instead? I think the law has exemptions for "mold, bodily fluids, insects, oil, or hazardous substances"... I've been throwing out dust cloths and certain cleaning cloths (the whole point of using old holey socks for such things imo is that you can just toss them if they're too gross to want in your laundry). I think I am going to throw it out, it just feels shitty to ask someone to process it who won't know that the stuff it's shedding is just the lining and might have to wonder if they just got chemical-exposed. Sorry, well-intentioned state law.)

Play-Doh Fun Factory and all our Play-Doh (some barely used, some heavily used) to a Buy Nothing guy who says his kid loves Play-Doh.

I am not much into the gifts part of Christmas and this time of year is not a lot of fun for me with relatives who want me to coach and coordinate their gift-giving to my kids (why is this my problem??) and box after box of Stuff showing up to my house that I have to receive and deal with and put somewhere. Doing this Disadvent thing has been so soothing. Every day I get to celebrate a little moment of something leaving and going off to a place where it can be more useful or safer or less in the way.

About five years' worth of Swarthmore alumni magazines to the 11yo's science teacher, who said at parents' night that she could use old magazines, and confirmed by email that those would be fine. I don't know what they'll be used for, but they do often have articles about scientist students and alumni, and I think they intentionally try to be diverse about it, so they're potentially a good source for images of scientists who aren't white men, if there's some kind of science collaging happening. (But for all I know they're being used for paper mache, or the pages are being ripped out and rolled up and banded together and used in an egg drop, I just don't know.)

(Now I'm thinking about all the content-irrelevant reasons a school might want magazines. Insulation. Soundproofing. Burning in a bomb calorimeter to demonstrate the conceptual stupidity of nutritional calories. Boxes of them used as doorstops. Etc.)

(This one is kind of an essay.) ( Read more... )