Green guilt

Fellow declutterer Kerry at The Simple Year wrote a post last week about the debate between selling stuff and donating it. I've recently given up selling stuff out of sheer exhaustion. I must've gotten even more tired lately (thank you eating disorder meds). I've tried to be green when decluttering by donating, selling stuff, trading, sharing, freecycling, all of that. But today I just gave up and threw this door in the trash!

We went in with good intentions, really we did. We have a Habitat for Humanity ReStore nearby which accepts used and new items for home renovation. This door was a spare that came with our place when we moved in. We own a sedan and we almost managed to get the whole door into the car. It barely fit -- except that we had to pull the driver's seat so close to the steering wheel that I couldn't get into the seat to drive!

I debated putting it on freecycle. The door had some marks on it and I realized it was not going to be easy to get rid of on freecycle. We debated tying it down to the roof rack. We debated taking it down the highway with a foot of the door hanging out of our trunk and held in only with twine. Then we took a hammer to the door and tossed the pieces into our building's dumpster. We saved the mechanism and will take that to the ReStore on our next trip.

I don't feel great about the decision but I am finding it more and more tiring to make the effort of finding homes for all of the stuff we get rid of. I am happy to have the space back.

Have you ever gotten to the point where you just want to trash it all? Do you? How do you deal with "green guilt?"

 The Reckoning 

 Decluttered item #197 is an old door that came with the condo we bought.

$2350.99 wasted on junk so far

This holiday flash mob will make you smile

Occasionally on weekends you can find me volunteering at one of the Smithsonian Museums here in D.C. Some of you have even met me there! I find volunteering a great way to cheer myself up when I'm feeling down. This week we had a very special treat at the Air and Space Museum and I wanted to share it with you. Watch it all the way through to the end, I promise it's worth it!

Hint: Look for the folks with the white stripes on the sides of their pants. About 1/2 of the way through, start looking up at the balcony for the second part of the surprise!

Here's how they pulled it off.

Happy holidays, everyone!

Antidepressants helped me get organized...and sick

Of course, I'm not a doctor, your health decisions are always up to you, and everything I write here is just my opinion.

But I did notice that after I started on my first antidepressant back in 2010 that it was much, much easier to get organized and stay organized.

On that first, and my second, my third, and my fourth antidepressants, organization of home and time seemed almost natural to me. Sure, I was still messy. But I understood that everything had a place. When I would finish with something, I would remember to put it back. I had the energy to put it back. I had the desire to put it back. The meds slowed my thoughts down and allowed me to stay focused on a task. Tasks that were mildly unpleasant or just uninteresting I now had the attention span to actually finish! I could say no to the desire to buy 10 of something and just buy one or maybe three. The deep need to "protect" myself with stuff was slowly going away.

The antidepressants also helped tremendously with my eating disorder. I had the energy and the desire to fight through the negative thoughts to find soothing activities to do instead of bingeing.

Hoarding is finally considered by many to be a formal mental illness that medication can help treat. Hoarding is even gaining acceptance as an honest-to-gosh disorder among the psychological community, gaining a place in the much-debated "diagnostic bible" of psychology, the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, 5th revision).

All I can say is, thank heavens. It's easier to get help for something that's actually considered a real sickness.

Do meds help hoarders? I'm no psychiatrist, but maybe now there will be more investigation into testing meds to see if hoarders can be helped with these wonderful but complicated chemicals (did you notice I've been on four different antidepressants in three years?) For me, I'm about to do my own little experiment: can I live an organized, ED-free life without them?

As you know if you read my revived eating disorder blog, Body Image Hope, you'll know that I've spent the last week in full-out drug withdrawal. I went on a new antidepressant in early Summer because I was allergic to the one I had been previously given. This new drug seemed wonderful. I've never been so happy in my life or so happy about my body in my life. There was just one problem: I gained a lot of weight on this one. Like 20 pounds in four months. My weight had previously been stable within a half pound range for almost a year. Anti-depressants have a reputation for weight gain and this one apparently lived up to its reputation.

I quit the drug almost cold-turkey. I spent some time on a half dose and then dropped down to nothing on Black Friday. Full-out drug withdrawal followed. On Tuesday I had to keep from tossing my cookies in front of my whole company while getting an award at our annual ceremony (yay me?) I couldn't get out of bed on Wednesday. I tried to go into work on Thursday and was sweating so profusely while shivering in a meeting that I got sent home.

Now I'm better, and I'm back.

Why do I say that? Because I noticed some other really weird side effects of my meds: I stopped blogging and I stopped playing guitar. I love both of these things. I'm off the meds now and suddenly all I want to do is blog and play my guitar. Very strange. So expect more posts from me.

My psych doc has decided based on this that I might actually be okay without the anti-depressants for the first time in years. I originally went on them because I was suicidal after my grandmother's death and in the early stages of ED recovery. But now I'm much more recovered (minus the 20 pounds, grumble grumble, but I can live with them now). I've made peace with Gram being gone. Great things are happening for me at work, I finally can say that I love what I do and I look forward to going into work in the morning.

I wonder how I'll do? I suppose there are other meds. But I think I'm tired of side effects for a while.

If you've ever tried meds, if you're willing to share, did you find that they helped your original condition? Did they help your sense of organization?

Freecycle success!

I've had mixed success unloading things on eBay. Yes, I've made money, but in the end it often goes like this:

1. post
2. repost
3. repost
4. sale!
5. locate packing materials. which really means, dumpster dive for old boxes
6. wrap
7. walk to post office
8. fork over almost as much money as I'm making to ship the darn thing
9. FINALLY get paid!  wait. I made $2 for all that work. ugh. 

Our thrift shop is a very long drive away. Time to let people come to me. Hello, freecycle!

This week we got rid of three big things on freecycle:

This college flag from the Chief Engineer's school days

this trashcan

and this construction box.

Why do I have one of these? Because when I went to college my mother felt that I was very sick and needed a ton of medications to take with me. She filled it. Now I use a drawer for my meds and a medicine cabinet for my personal care items.

The Reckoning

The flag was apparently worth it for the Chief engineer. The trashcan was picked up from my MIL's stash when she cleaned out a while back. I have to stop picking up free stuff! At least there was no money wasted.

And my mom bought the construction box. So three items gone, but at least no money wasted.

*196 items decluttered*

$2350.99 wasted on junk

Silly wedding gifts

I was *not* smart when I registered for gifts for our wedding. Apparently some wedding website thought it brilliant to suggest that you register for three times as many gifts as guests. We had 105 people at our wedding. Yes, I registered for 300 gifts.

We live in a 1200-square-foot condo. We lived in 900 square feet when we got married. It was also a high rise with no patio. And yet somehow I managed to register for a lawn mower and a charcoal grill. I was drunk on the American dream.

Fortunately the lawn mower didn't show up but the grill did! My MIL was kind enough to keep it for a while but we took it back last month.  Since then I've had one of these things sitting in our soon-to-be Matrix movie-watching room:

This grill can be yours for the low, low price of $79.99! Or almost $100 when you decide you need to also register for the charcoal starter chimney! Ugh. What was I thinking?!

I'd listed it on craigslist with no takers, not surprising given that it was 40 degrees this week. But Sunday we went out to lunch with my ex-boyfriend's college roomate and friends...though not the ex-boyfriend, haha. Two of the friends got married this summer and we've all attended each others' weddings. We were talking about awful/useless wedding gifts that we've received and the Chief Engineer brought up the silly charcoal grill that was taking up space in our back room. I was bemoaning the fact that no one was buying it when my friend chimed in, "Hey, I'll take it!"

He paid for our lunches and we drove him home to hand over the grill. I am so happy to see that thing gone from our back room!


Now I just have to figure out what to do with the cheeseboard that someone gave us as a wedding gift...to my dairy-allergic husband. Le sigh.

What were your silliest wedding gifts or registry items?

The Reckoning

We could've registered for something sensible that we would use, but instead we wasted that one gift on a grill.

Items 192 and 193: a weber kettle grill and charcoal starter.
Value: $100
Total money wasted on stuff we shouldn't have bought/registered for:

$2350.99

Knock, knock, Neo.

It's been a while. I survived the DC furlough and three weeks off gave me an incredible amount of time to think. No, I'm not stopping the blog, but I do think I needed a break. It's amazing how much even things I do for fun become things that I keep telling myself I "should" do more often, and then they become burdensome. Posting was one of those things where I kept "should"-ing myself and I took a much-needed break.

I spent the time not doing nearly as much decluttering as I wanted to do. Which is fine. I did spend quite a bit of time on something called Amazon Mechanical Turk, which is a website run by Amazon.com where you can get paid a pittance to do small jobs, most of which are either transcription or psychology studies. It helped me contribute a bit financially and it gave me a chance to learn more about myself. Psychology studies are actually really cool! Yeah, I'm a geek.

I focused on taking studies about anxiety and eating disorders, since my eating disorder has gotten worse in the last couple months. Stress at work, medication changes, still not talking to my family, and it all adds up to .... a return to intensive outpatient treatment. I begin again in three nights a week of treatment on Wednesday this week.

On the plus side, I also spent a lot of time thinking about what makes me happy in life. One of those things is Spanish, so I decided to take two months next summer to study abroad and work at a medical library in Spain. I have the paid vacation time at work and it's considered a sabbatical, so it should be quite doable and very fulfilling. After that, we finally decided that it's time to settle down and have a baby.

Which brings us, oddly enough, back to decluttering! Our spare bedroom has never really been used for anything except storage. Over the furlough I decided that I wanted more out of the room before we turn it into a nursery. So for the next 2-3 years, or until the kid is old enough to realize what he/she is looking at, we're going to have a Matrix-themed room! We moved the TV into the back room and are trying to get more of the junk out of it.

This was the room before we started.

The plan for the room is as follows:

1. Move bed to opposite wall. get nice backrest pillows so that the bed can be a place to watch tv. Beds are my preferred place for tv-watching and the chief engineer won't let tvs enter our bedroom.
2. Put skis in closet
3. Get rid of desk in closet
4. Replace desk in closet with counter-height butcher block table to create a standing desk
5. Remove excess clutter
6. Paint walls
7. Put our three matrix posters up
8. Celebrate by watching the Matrix!

Furlough day 3: A saucy day

Today's decluttering was again food-allergy related. When I saw my allergist last week I got the final list of everything I'm allergic to. It took this long because I had some unusual tests done. Boy does it explain some things though. 

I already mentioned that I was allergic to my anti-depressant. I've known for decades about the cinnamon allergy. But what I didn't realize was that a common preservative, sodium benzoate, produces an allergic reaction in people who are allergic to cinnamon. But here was the big shocker: I'm genuinely allergic to aspartame. 

It explains a lot about the issues I've had with my eating disorder and artificial sweeteners. My stomach was always very irritated because the t-cell reaction I get can produce inflammatory symptoms for up to 96 hours after exposure. I don't think I've gone 96 hours without diet soda in the last decade. I wonder if it's part of why I inevitably binge within 48 hours of drinking diet soda. 

So anyways, I've gone a week without diet soda. I got rid of everything in the fridge with sodium benzoate. I also tossed the last few things that contained "natural flavors" or "spices,"  at my doctor's suggestion. Cinnamon and its derivatives don't have to be labeled explicitly in the US, they can just be lumped under one of those two term. I also gave the box of fig newtons I had to the homeless man by the grocery store. Apparently they have cinnamon in them. 

The rashes have been around for years. I usually walked around looking like the picture on the left. When I didn't look like that it was because I was wearing foundation. Once I made the dietary changes, voila, one week later, I look normal.

I AM SO HAPPY!!!

I celebrated by doing some re-cluttering, though. I found six cruets for a total of $14 and today I had enough time courtesy of my furlough days that made my own salad dressings. I am a salad addict and most dressings contain spices, natural flavors, or sodium benzoate. Ketchup apparently contains cinnamon. Recipes are linked below. 

From L-R: italian, ranch, ketchup, balsamic vinaigrette, Colonial Williamsburg's malt vinaigrette, honey mustard

making ketchup

I used to buy expensive salad dressings, like $3-4 per bottle and I go through a couple bottles a month. This should end up saving quite a bit of money over the long term. Not to mention, now I don't have to take all of these pills for my allergies and the stress caused by them!

More reasons to spend money on security and not stuff

Guess what? I just got furloughed!

The "company" I work for gave me notice this morning, so here I am at home, waiting for Congress to figure things out. In the meantime, time to declutter my life a little bit!

I've disappeared from the interwebs in the last month courtesy of some little health problems. It turns out I was allergic to my antidepressant. We took me off that and I tried a new one. I turned into a zombie on that one, so we went back to the one I was on before, just a different formulation. Surprise, surprise, the rash and itching came back. I got a fourth antidepressant, which actually works! I feel like the last month has disappeared into a fog of itching, drowsiness, and unfortunately, a shocking amount of bingeing. Turns out those meds really did help keep my eating disorder under control.

Happily, things are calmer now.  I get the added bonus of a few vacation days! Time to catch up on all of your wonderful comments that I've ignored in the last month.

Unfortunately it does mean that until Congress gets its act together, I don't have a paycheck.  For that reason I am very, very glad that we have an emergency fund. I'm really not worried about being on unpaid leave for three weeks or three months if that's what it takes. The amount of money we've been spending each month on crap has been slowly declining. Not only has that meant more savings, but it's meant that we need less income to get by. Hopefully this month we can live entirely on the Chief Engineer's salary.

Now -- to learn to cope with the stress of a furlough without turning to any bad habits -- collecting free stuff, buying things, or eating myself into an oblivion. I'm planning on posting some more things on ebay and craigslist, maybe going and playing my guitar on the street, reading some more, making some gifts I owe people. How do you keep occupied when you suddenly have a ton of free time?

Creating extra space in the fridge

If you've lived in a condo, apartment, or dorm, you're used to small fridges. I'm okay with a small fridge because it means there's less space to hide food. My family's fridge and freezer are so large and so full that food can literally go for years before it's unearthed.

But a small fridge is a little tricky if you like melons, or make large round containers of soup or casserole. What to do? Use your vertical space.

The two plates didn't fit next to each other. But put the one plate on top of the applesauce jar and eureka! They fit!

This trick can also be used when trying to get two bowls or plates in a small microwave.

Got any space-saving fridge or freezer tricks up your sleeve?

How'd We Do That?! Fun With Spreadsheets, part deux

I've tracked our expenses since January of this year, even though I didn't implement any kind of money plan until this month. The red cells are the times when we went over the budget that I set for August. I can't complain about overpaying on my student loan, though. 

Impossible to read, I know. Click the spreadsheet to make it big enough to see.

The first block of categories is the "necessary" stuff. The second block is obviously the stuff we would instantly cut completely if one of us lost our job. I forgot the total for the second block -- it's a bit over $666. The green column is the average for the year so far. We had the best month we've had all year, spending a total of $2433.47 on expenses that aren't our mortgage or our condo fee. I'm still horrified, as I used to live on $1000 a month (including rent!) when I lived in Philadelphia. But this is DC, DC, DC and it's as bad as New York sometimes. 

But I'll hang onto the success. It left me wondering what went differently from other months and helped us to stay under budget?

• I watched our purchases like a hawk this month. Unfortunately, this also kept me very stressed. So next month I will total up purchases at the end of each week, but not look at anything money-related in between.
• We actively focused on staying home and entertaining ourselves there. We know that if we go out to do a single activity, say, go to a movie, it ends up turning into more than that. Dinner and a movie. Dinner, a movie, and ice cream for me. Dinner, a movie, and a swing by the grocery store for junk food on the way back. You get the picture.
• We actively tried to cook more at home.
• I focused on making money this month instead of spending it. I put a lot of energy into selling things on ebay. I earmarked all of those profits for my student loan so there was no temptation to spend the money. Ebaying stuff was an activity that took the place of some other spendy activities I might have done, like going to the bookstore.
• I looked at each purchase in terms of how many items I would have to sell on ebay to pay for it. I haven't made much money on ebay and it's been a lot of work. Am I going to go toss the $8 I just made selling a beanie baby on lunch out? No, I'm going to keep it and put it towards my student loan.
• We did not buy physical objects that couldn't be consumed, except for one item. I had some old, ugly jewelry Grandmom had given me melted down into a wedding band. My hands swell horribly in the summer heat and I can't wear the one the Chief Engineer gave me at our wedding for a good 2-3 months out of the year. When the ring disappears each year, people ask questions. I don't like it, so I wanted something I could wear in the summer. It was $75 for the labor -- but the jeweler asked me to do some artwork for his store, and I expect to make about $75 off the piece. It'll work out in the end!

Next month will be much more difficult as I know we have over $500 in medical expenses alone next month. I'll plan for that in the next post.

What would you change about my spending habits? Happily looking for suggestions.