EIGHTY-THREE pairs of socks

I have been pondering a bit on that same subject of minimalism.  While I am not a true minimalist (I have things in my life that go beyond the practical - like sparkly bracelets, for example, and I don't think true minimalists have sparkly bracelets.  They have like...a tattoo of a bracelet or none at all.), I do relish, enjoy and agree with the tenets of minimalism.  I suppose if there were a spectrum of hoarding/consumerism on one side and minimalism on the other, I'd like to place myself 75% towards minimalistic.

Here's why - as part of my whole philosophy on organization and life, I believe that you either own your stuff or it owns you.  I have worked with a lot of hoarders in the past and the problem isn't a physical one (well, it is - they risk their lives as they walk down their hallways of towering boxes and junk and can't sleep on the other side of their beds because their pile of clothing might wake up and attack them or their cat is living in it).  It is completely a mental issue.  Even if - EVEN IF - you were to go in with a team of expert organizers for five days straight and fill seventeen dumpsters of utter crapola, if you left this suffering person to themselves without helping what's behind it mentally, you could walk back in in 90 days and find things were how they were before you cleaned it all up.

This, I think, has two sources.  The first source comes out of the philosophy of what happened during the Great Depression.  Everything that could have a possible use was saved, from scraps to cardboard to only partway rusty nails and the rest.  People didn't know if they would be able to make it and so they scrimped beyond what was normal up to that point in history.  The adults and children of this generation had their lives severely changed and molded because of this traumatic experience.  They had children and some passed on that "save" mentality.

This coincided with the second source - the birth of ultra-consumerism.  In the 1950's, people lived with a lot less than what we do now.  I have personal proof of this in my house.  Our house was built in the early 1950's.  It is about 950 square feet and the closets are 36" - 44" across.  There is no pantry.  In this neighborhood, pretty much everyone has 3 bedrooms: one for the parents, one for the boy children, and one for the girl children.  The amount of children could be 3, 6, or 10.  Some people slept in beds with their siblings.  And those 3 children in one room SHARED that 36" closet.  

If that were a situation someone had to be put into now, they'd cry out as if they were being tormented and abused.  Where on EARTH would they put their laptops, ipods, fifteen pairs of jeans and 300 articles of clothing!?

As the decades chugged on, house sizes got markedly bigger.  The average house size for homes built in the 60's was much larger than those built in the 50's; the 70's showed averages larger than the 60's; the 80's continued the pattern and it increases until today.  Why?  Were people just turning into giants and they needed more room?  (Well...some were getting a bit fatter, but that's not the why, I don't think.)  No.  People wanted to jump onto the bigger, faster, more bandwagon that they bought into as they watched their new favorite family member, the TV, and the commercials therein.  There was no cause to scrimp - people in the United States were not living in a war time (men did go off to war, but that's the thing, they left and war wasn't here and present around us, so those who stayed back, although affected somewhat, were not as affected as let's say those who lived in London in the times of the air raids.).

Then the fish tank thing happened.  You know how fish grow in proportion to the size of their tanks?  Yeah, well, that was people and their homes.  They got a larger home and they filled it up to the top until they decided they needed more room and built a larger house and moved in and filled it up too.  

I had a client once who, after I asked him what he would do if he started noticing he had too many things in his house to live comfortably said, "Oh, that's no problem, I usually just build another storage facility."  SUPERB.  Yes, great.  Pay money to build storage and house your stuff.  I might say that somewhat owned him rather than the other way around.  

So this brings me to yesterday.  Ever since I wrote the post about the minimalist dude, I have been purging my house like a madwoman.  I attacked the basement, the kid closets, my own closet, the hallway closet and the linen closet.  3 giant black garbage bags filled with crapola are gone.  There was something else that was nagging me in the back of my head, though.  There was this pit, this black hole...and it was so prolific and there were...socks...climbing out of it.

It was my dear husband's dresser.  He has a thing for socks.  I left him to himself in this area and I've never purged this for him in our entire life together.  

Until.

Last.

Night.

Oh he did not like this, not one little bit.  I was on a tornado-ish path throughout the house and when this little lightbulb went off for this area, it seemed as if I had hit the jackpot of purging.  It seemed as if I had struck gold.  The joy of purging these depths filled me with excited estatic joy!  It filled my husband with tiredness and dread.

But being the lovely he is, he succumbed to my torture.  I dove in.  I began pulling out sock by sock by sock.  I counted them and piled them on the top of the dresser.  I began hysterical laughter as I got to 50...then 60...then SEVENTY (?!) and finally we toppled over everything and found the last pair, #83.  And a half.  (One of the little guys didn't have a partner.)

Those socks had a death grip on him, though.  He wanted to keep this one because what was wrong with it, it was perfectly fine!  This one was soft and you can't get rid of a soft sock!  What if this other one gets a hole?  Are you going to get rid of this other one that could be a backup?

*cough* sock hoarder *cough* *cough*

Now wait just a minute.  You may think, "Oh, what a naughty boy!"  If you do, I challenge you to go count your socks, or articles of clothing you've saved since you were a freshman in college.  Unless you are a minimalist, you have no room to talk and if you talk smack on my hubby, I got his back and you betta check yo-self befo' you wreck yo-self!!  (I'm the only one allowed to call him a sock hoarder.  You know the drill.  You can mess with your bro, but if someone else does, they're gonna get it.)  Ahem.  Yes.  All I'm saying is, don't diss.

This example is to bring to light for you a possible area you may have neglected over the years.  Are you a sock lover?  Do you just rue the day that anyone suggest to you that you throw away a book?  Do you keep CDs like you're hoping you'll one day DJ a frat party?  Are you saving that entire half-wardrobe of clothes that "might fit one day once I lose x pounds"?  Get real with yourself.  You AIN'T gonna wear those, baby.  By the time you lose your weight, you'd rather go to Salvation Army and wear those than your hoochie mama mini-skirt you flaunted to the club when you were 19.

So get going.  What has a hold on you?  Don't let it own you.  Purge, baby.  I don't want to picture you as you crouch over your crapola wide-eyed whispering, "My preciouses..."  Yeah.  Go on, Schmigle.  You can do it.

Be the boss of your stuff.  It shouldn't control you.  Fight ultra-consumerism.  Live right, live simply.

Peace, love and go fill up a garbage bag (or twenty),
Ms. Daisy

A Minimalist Dude

I think a good way to go in life is to live simply.

I found a dude who is doing that to the max.  Or is it more accurate to say minimum?  Anyway, you know what I mean.

I found him when I googled "how can I convince my hubby not to buy a new TV" and his blog came up.  Why was I searching for that phrase in the first place, I suppose you may be wondering - well, I'll tell you.  We had this TV, it was new-ish (4 years old?) and this last week or so it started smelling like a meltdown electrical burning toxic puddle of explosion.

Yay, hooray, I say!  The TV is dying!  Finally I can rearrange my living room furniture! GLORY!  No more TV!  Freedom, freedom, freeeeeedoooom!!!

But somehow that was lost in translation.  A broken, un-fixable TV to my hubby meant that he was going to buy a new one.  Wha?  A new one?  We don't even have cable, my peeps.  We HAVE AN ANTENNA.  We get something awesome like 19 channels.  Five of them are PBS.  So you can see how vital TV is to my life.  When The Office was on, I watched TV once a week.  Now the series is over and so is my TV watching.  

So, back to the minimalist guy.  He certainly doesn't have a TV.  He has 416 things that he carries around in his RV.  He has a kid, a wife and they have a Jeep.  His blog is called http://manvsdebt.com/.  He advocates selling all of your crap, keeping minimal stuff (see the difference between crap and stuff?  I do hope so.) and doing what you love, in a debt-free manner.

He literally inventories all of his stuff and takes a picture of it.  (Or I think his wife takes the pictures.)  He has nothing superfluous whatsoever.  I do not know how he makes a smoothie (since I don't remember seeing that he had a blender), but I suppose it is a small price to pay for his care-free life.

What would you get rid of if you were going to really think about all of the things you needed - and just kept THOSE things?  He has 5 pairs of socks, 10 undershirts, 2 or 3 pairs of pants, a minimal amount of books, 17 total silverware pieces.  His daughter has two coloring books.  His wife has one dress.  (This I could not do.  Are you really going to wear the same dress to church every single week?  What about your girls night out dress?)  I like this, though, however nose-wrinkled I get on it.

Some people I talk to sometimes say they live (or used to live) in a small house.  (Okay, I'm not talking about people who lived in China in a 12x12 room or my friends who went to the Peace Corps and lived in a hut.  I'm talking about people who are mentioning their house here in the U.S. of A.)  Then, after I furrow my brow a bit and ask them to clarify, they say something like, "Oh, yeah.  Not as small as this."  (p.s. "This" = my house.)  No, it's not the 234 square feet at Ikea, but it's an itty bitty cute cozy home and if it isn't organized and minimalized, it looks like a cross between those hoarder people and the world's largest trash dump.  Let me give you a glimpse - I have 22" of closet space (half of it is behind a wall).  The depth is exactly one standard hanger.  My hubby gets the other 22" (although sometimes I squish him to 20" and I take 24", sorry honey.) and we make it work.

But even with what most would consider keeping a minimum, I know we could do with a lot less.  

As I've been reading about this, I've (obviously) been inspired to purge (how could you not!).  I bagged up some books I know I'll never read again (off to the Friends Of The Library they go), some kitchen utensils I don't use, some decorative candle holders, some magazines I thought I'd re-read (but didn't), and the purge continues.  I'm going to hit the undies drawer for all the peeps in my fam because when I thought about it, unless you're in the very middle of toilet-training (which, imho, should be done way earlier than most people do it), you don't need more than 5-7 (you are doing laundry more than once a week, no?).

So what could you do without?  Would you like to be more minimalistic?  Do you long to live more simply?  Or do you think it's bunk?

Gotta go pitch some undies (that's knickers and pants for my Brits).

Peace, love and cheers to making it easy on yourself,
Ms. Daisy

Just do it, and right now, por favor.

Do you ever feel like things are falling to shambled pieces all around you?  Do you ever look around your house and as your eyes fall upon one thing to the next, each view is a reminder of a chore you need to get done?

I was speaking to one of my organizational consultation clients about this very subject recently.  Here's what I think - I've often said that the people who seem to be the most organized really have a secret laziness.  I know this doesn't seem to be possible, but let me explain.

People who are very organized are guardians of their future investment, specifically in the area of time.  Here's an example: let's just call this person Sean.  Sean walks into his house and takes his shoes off (he doesn't want to get mud on his kitchen floor), he walks immediately over to the closet to hang up his coat (instead of putting it on the banister at the bottom of the stairs or throwing it over the back of a chair), and puts his keys on the key hook and cell phone in its designated place.  He stands over the garbage can and pitches all of the junk mail, opens the bills and puts them on his desk (where he will pay them later at the time he has designated each week to do so), marks the invitation to the fishing tournament on his calendar and off he goes.  This really isn't a big deal, right?  He's not really taking up a lot of time, just a couple minutes (if that).  Good job, Sean.  You guys should see his garage!

Contrast that with someone we'll call Ms. Piggy.  Ms. Piggy walks into her house, drops her purse on the floor next to the door, throws her coat on the couch, dumps her pile of mail onto the kitchen table and off she goes (with her dirty shoes) to find her lost skirt that she totally wanted to wear out tonight, but she has no idea where she put it AND she is in a rush because she's supposed to meet her friends in 45 minutes but she didn't plan any dinner (and she is totally starving and they're all going out for drinks, so really she should have something, but whatEVER, she's got to get that skirt).

But oh crudsicles, Ms. Piggy took 43 minutes to find her lost skirt and then on the way out she realizes she can't find her keys that she must have put somewhere when she came in in a rush, oh CRUD!  WHY?  WHY?!  WHYYYYYYY!?  Now she's late, she has had no food and she's going to spend ten more minutes trying to find her keys.  Great.

Fast-forward to future, Ms. Piggy has collected a lovely pile of mail on her kitchen table (which she now cannot eat off of because it is so covered in myriads of junk) and she has to toss a few jackets to and fro off of the couch to find the right one (and a place to sit).  

Here's the point: In order for Sean to have his stuff cleaned up, he will need to take about zero minutes to do it.  In order for Ms. Piggy to de-piggify, she basically just ate her entire Sunday afternoon.  Sean was protective of his future time by using thirty seconds of what he has now to save himself several hours later.  Ms. Piggy blew her time now by spending her future time.

Every single thing you do to save your time now is putting it in the bank for later.  Time is just like money.  Little by little makes a difference.  You don't know what you'll have for time later, so don't swipe it like an impulse with your credit card.

My mantra: if you can do it in 30 seconds, don't wait.  Just do it.  You will spare your future self time, possibly money and multiple piles of stress.

Anyway, just a thought.  Whaddya think?

Peace, love and just do it - now,
Ms. Daisy

To microwave or not to microwave: that is the question.

Have you ever considered life without a microwave?  I mean, seriously considered it.  Well, first off, I suppose I should ask you if you own one, really.  If you don’t, I can guess that you have already loudly answered my question.  But if you’ve got one, I encourage you to ponder whether or not you might actually be able to have a go without it.

What do you use it for?  To heat up your coffee (or tea) for the fortieth time since you’ve not had a moment of time to sit down and drink it, probably.  That and maybe defrosting meat?  Maybe you cook with it.

At any rate, I have to tell you about my little sister.  First of all, she is amazing and great.  But that’s not exactly the point (this time, anyway) – I just wanted to mention it (in case you didn’t know and/or were wondering).  So after she got married, she lived in a cute little home that did NOT have a microwave!  I went over there once and I was like, “Um, where’s your microwave…?”  (I was probably attempting to reheat a cup of tea.)  She told me she didn’t have one.

I went home that day in awe and shame.  I am the one who is supposed to be the health fanatic (otherwise known in my family as a “weirdo”) and my little sister did not have a microwave and I did.  A silly old one, in fact – so old that I had it in college (which was probably 100 years ago).  It was small, though, so at least it fit in my kitchen.

But I digress.

So you know, right, about microwaves? 

I’m going to quote from Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon:

Unfortunately, the microwave achieved instant popularity without much prior research to study the effects of eating microwaved food.  In consequence, one large experiment involving an unwitting populace is now in progress.  The small amount of research done on the effects of eating microwaved food has shown that the microwave may have unfavorable effects on fats and proteins, making them more difficult to assimilate.  More recent studies carried out in Switzerland revealed that the microwave caused changes in vitamin content and availability.  Eating microwaved food results in abnormal blood profiles, similar to those that occur in the early stages of cancer.  An especially dangerous practice is using the microwave for heating baby’s bottle.  Altered amino acids in microwaved milk can be toxic to the liver and nervous system, especially for infants.  We recommend that you resist using the microwave at all costs.

Grrrrrrrreat.

Tom Valentine in Search for Health says, “The same violent friction and athermic deformations that can occur in our bodies when we are subjected to radar or microwaves happens to the molecules in the food cooked in a microwave oven.  In fact, when anyone microwaves food the oven exerts a power input of about 1000 watts or more.  This radiation results in destruction and deformation of molecules of food and in the formation of new compounds (called radiolytic compounds) unknown to man and nature.  Today’s established science and technology argues forcefully that microwaved food, and irradiated foods, do not have any significantly high “radiolytic compounds” than do broiled, baked or other conventionally cooked foods – but microwaving does produce more of these critters.  Curiously, neither established science nor our ever protective government has conducted any tests of the effects of eating the various kinds of cooked foods on the blood of eaters.  Dr. Hands Hertel did test it, and the indication is clear that something is amiss and larger studies should be funded.”

That does not sound very good.  And really, if you think about it, he’s right.  I mean, I haven’t really heard a lot about microwaved food and whether or not it is safe to consume – I mean, I suppose if you really sat down and thought about it,  you’d have to figure that it is probably better to bake something than to microwave it, but why?  That’s the important question that can turn you from an avid microwaver to a conventional cooker.

One more bit here – this is from Warren Clough from the PPNF Health Journal.  He says, “The second reason I dislike microwave ovens is the more serious situation.  What about the quality of the food that comes out of the oven and is immediately consumed – free radicals and all.  With the depressed immune system of the average affluent American, the last thing we need is another increase in our free radicals.  It is well documented that microwaves are powerful enough to rupture cell walls of the food matrix, and this is undoubtedly why protein molecules are altered from microwave cooking.”

What!  Rupture cell walls?!  Holy smokes, Batman!  Shutteth uppeth!

That is messed up.  For real.  Have you ever thought about this?  It is seriously kind of nutso.

Other studies have shown strange results.  Subjects who consumed microwaved food had:

-       +  A decrease in hemoglobin levels

-       + A decrease in HDL levels (“good cholesterol”)

-       + A decrease in lymphocytes and leukocytes (a.k.a. white blood cells – a.k.a. the things that kill bad stuff in your body)

-       +  Increase in luminous power in luminous bacteria within the blood of the subjects (a.k.a. radioactive energy in their blood cells)

I’m pretty sure none of those are going to help anyone in the long run, unless, of course, your main goal in life is to die early of strange causes.

At any rate, would you consider doing a little research into the topic and think about living life without the radioactive appliance?  We are so accustomed to it, but if you banish it, you just might find that you are just fine without it.

We put ours out of the kitchen and into the dungeon about six months ago and we’re glad we did.  You can heat up your coffee or tea just as fast using a pot on the stove.  Yes, you’ve got to think about what you’re going to have for dinner ahead of time (if you need to defrost something), but besides that, it’s a pleasant thing.  The food tastes a thousand times better and it’s nice to know I’m not eating cancer cells.  It’s really not that big of a deal once you switch. 

You can do this.  You might even like not having one.

Something to think about.

Peace, love and I’ll take mine sans radiation,

Ms. Daisy