The 15-year supply of aluminum foil

Shortly after my folks got married in '73, my father went on one of his "OMG, there's a sale!!!" shopping binges. He bought aluminum foil. Lots and lots of aluminum foil.

Enough aluminum foil, in fact, that I was seven years old when we finally ran out.

Please note: my parents waited ten years to have me. If my dad bought the foil in '75 and I was seven in 1990, then my father purchased 15 years of aluminum foil. I might be able to justify that if it were canned food and we were expecting an apocalypse, but really? Aluminum foil?

My mother may be the hoarder, but my father is a compulsive saver, particularly when it comes to food.  He will drive to every. single. grocery store in town to save 50 cents on butter, $1.00 on eggs, and buy-one-get-one-free ice cream. It would be fine except that I figure 1/3 of what he purchases gets thrown out because it goes bad or no one likes it. The freezers (plural) in my parents' house are pretty good evidence of this.

My eating disorder has made me particularly dodgy about hoarding food. I feel a compulsion to save food and buy large quantities of it because I starved myself for so many years and my body and mind are quite honestly afraid that the food will go away. I've also probably acquired some of my dad's tendencies to hoard food that's on sale. I once broke my own granny cart trying to haul home 35 pounds of flour that was on sale. It's been a real challenge to start to break myself of this habit.

How can I avoid hoarding food?

Some of my food hoarding problems are being addressed as I work with my dietician and my psychologist. I've developed a mantra of, "I can always have more later," and have learned to give myself permission to go out and get specific foods when I really crave them instead of hoarding them in the house in case the urge strikes. Not keeping half the grocery store cookie aisle in my cupboard also makes me less likely to act on my bulimic habits.

Some of my food hoarding habits are a result of an occasionally obsessive desire to live in a more self-sufficient way. There's nothing wrong with this, but I tend to take it to an extreme. Do I need 75 pounds of flour? Good question.

To get through the compulsive saver tendencies I've inherited from dad, I have to ask myself these two things:

1. Am I likely to use it before it goes bad? It won't be saving any money if I waste any!
2. How long will it take me to go through this? 6 months is my limit. I won't keep more than a six-month supply of anything.

I've tried adding up the cost of wasted food and that has helped me see that I'm not saving any money by buying large packages. I clean out the fridge each week to keep better track of what we're using and how much we actually need to buy when we shop. I'm slowly learning to buy normal packages of fruit and veg instead of the costco-sized boxes which invariably end up going bad.

Food gone bad this week: alioli leftover from takeout (pennies), bean soup ($1),  rice-corn-and-bean taco filling ($2),  rice and haddock dinner leftovers ($7 of the $15 filet we bought.) Total: $10! In a week!

For pantry items I do have to think about how frequently we go through those items, which are tempting to buy in large quantities because they take a long time to go bad. And yet we bought 75 pounds of flour at costco last week.

a mere 25 pounds. each of those containers holds five.

This stuff we use and we go through 75 pounds in about 4 months. We make all our own bread, baked goods, and even our own bisquick. In the spirit of blogging more about eco-friendly and sustainable living, I'll post the recipe for that tomorrow as this post is already too long!

So how do you balance saving money / being frugal / living more sustainably with overbuying or hoarding food?


Ps.
For those of you who were wondering, the first phase of the kitchen semi-remodel finished up on Thursday.

Next we'll be putting in a cabinet and counter where the table currently is and replacing the floor. That will probably happen in June/July as we do not plan to use loans to complete the project. If we don't have enough money, we'll wait. 

The countertop and the sink in the existing area are in pretty bad shape and need to be replaced along with the backsplash, so those we will have replaced in the Fall. The existing cabinets are brand new (2004...new to us!) and it didn't seem very eco-friendly or wallet-friendly to replace a bunch of cabinets that are in pretty good shape. Those and the appliances stay. 

It's been a relief already. We each have food allergies (different ones) so it's comforting that I can make my dairy meals far, far away from the Chief Engineer's food with no worries that anything will accidentally get cross-contaminated. No ER visits for us tonight!

Two-by-fours in front of the piano

The past seven days have been pretty momentous for me. On Thursday I graduated from seven weeks of intensive outpatient treatment for the eating disorder I've struggled with since 2001 (go me!). While I'm by no means fixed, and I'll fight this for the rest of my life, I'm much, much better than I was before I started treatment. It's nice to have 15 hours of my life back each week.

Also last week our contractors started work taking down the kitchen wall, I gave a well-received presentation in front of 200 people and started to possibly get over my phobia of public speaking, I played my guitar and sang in front of human beings other than the one I'm married to, and got psychologically ready to turn 30 tomorrow. Okay, there wasn't much work with that. I'm pretty excited about being 30.

I definitely wasn't sleeping much last week and I was really concerned that all of the disorganized patterns of life that I learned growing up would rear their ugly heads amidst the insanity. Funny thing was, the condo was more organized last week than it's been in ages. I couldn't afford not to be organized.

But the minute everything was over on Friday afternoon, this happened:

So I've kept the kitchen neat (AND THE WALL IS GONE!!)

There's only a small amount of clutter on the kitchen table...and a melon

Yes, I did leave a pillow on the table next to the front door

The gerbils, the contents of the kitchen and part of the dining room had to migrate
into the spare bedroom during construction

And this photo is just here to prove that the last one really isn't as bad as it looks

Ignore the floor...I kept my nightstand clear. I get points for that, right?

My bathroom has stayed organized--
I only had to pick two shirts, one jacket, and my sneakers off the floor to take this picture.
Thank heavens!

But this is my personal favorite...

The two-by-fours in front of the piano make me laugh every time. 

And they're not going anywhere for a while.

If I learned anything from my eating disorder treatment, it's that I need to have a little more compassion for myself. I was freakin' exhausted after the last seven weeks and I just didn't want to expend the energy to be neat this weekend -- and that's okay! It's just one weekend. And three weeks of construction. 

See you later this week for a return to our regularly scheduled decluttering. 

That's three hours of work completely undone

Long night of eating disorder treatment done. I come home, obsessively check Facebook, and read my baby sister's status:

"Things that are less than awesome: When you've thrown something away, because you don't use it, and you open up a cabinet and TADA there it is because someone fished it out of the trash like a crazy hobo."

And to think I just spent the past three hours finally coming to realize that I needed to stop blaming my parents for my problems.

Back room deals

Work on cleaning and organizing our spare bedroom continues, as I don't seem to have time for much else right now. At least this way I can watch the progress. I've always felt that being able to see your progress when you're decluttering is extremely important, especially when you're trying to clean/organize/downsize an entire condo or house. Otherwise it can be a daunting and honestly depressing job.

You can check out the previous posts for earlier pictures that you can compare to these.

I confess, I'm not good at making beds.

Look! The bags of clothes are gone!

Skis are still there though.

Most of the difference comes from having gotten rid of several bags of ill-fitting, disliked, or otherwise ED-inducing clothing.

Pants

More pants

Oh look, more pants. And shoes.

That's a lot of gloves! And mom's snow pants, turned inside out.  But those are a size six, and neither one of us has been that size for a while. Out they go.

In total it's 17 items. I'll skip adding them to the decluttered items list though because I really want to save that for the big stuff. Clothes come and go in my life especially now that my weight is all over the place with treatment. I may have gotten rid of 17 things, but I just bought 8 pairs of paints in two sizes, three shirts, and a pair of shoes to match the shirts and my new and improved mood. I'd grumble, but right now making myself feel good in clothing is extremely important. Whether or not my pants are loose and comfortable regardless of their size can literally be the difference between two days of bingeing followed by days of starvation, and "normal," relaxed days. But we'll discuss that later.

Forward momentum!

before and after: our spare room

I want to thank everyone, particularly EcoCatLady for your support as I navigate the craziness of my six-week stint in intensive outpatient treatment for my eating disorder. Normally it's three nights a week for six weeks but today most of D.C. shut down for the "Snowquester," or probably more aptly termed, the "No-quester." They predicted six-to-ten inches of snow. We got three and it all melted as soon as it the ground...but we did get a day off! I have time to blog and declutter and I haven't done either in a while so I thought I would reward everyone's patience with some before-and-after photos.

We have a two-bedroom condo and out back room has always confused us. It's a normal room, huge at a generous 11 x 16 feet. It'll eventually be our kid's room but for the moment we don't really know what to do with it.

What are we using the room for? What do we want to use it for? I want an entertainment room with a futon and a TV. The Chief Engineer wants a bedroom with a desk. He wants space to play with his k'nex. I want a place to curl up with my feet up and write or read or watch netflix. I don't want a lot of furniture. He wants to have a guest bed. Neither one of us is happy.

Check out the room back in the Fall.

Ginormous desk. Big enough for both of us to work.
It turned out that we didn't need that much work space.

The gigantic queen-sized bed competed for space with
my huge quilting hoop, my guitar, and a poang chair from Ikea.

See that huge square bag in the middle of the photo?
It's a bag full of pillows. Ten pillows, no kidding!

The closet. Not an inch of space to be found.

Then Snowquestration happens and we have free time to organize!

We got rid of quite a bit of stuff. The ikea chair got moved to my work office a while back. The quilting hoop found a home in the living room, the folding table found a home in the foyer, the guitar went into the living room, the cello has vanished, the lamp got donated a while back. Then the Chief Engineer added the k'nex set in the corner, but I'll live. Here's the room as it was this morning. It's got a long way to go and is very messy but I'm much happier with the new layout.

The pillows are now getting used as backrests for the bed. 

I get a couch and the Chief Engineer keeps the spare bed without having to buy a futon.

He keeps the bed -- I keep the bike.

The ironing I haven't done in weeks. And my skis needed a temporary home.
Still need to figure out where those will live permanently.
Hey, at least they're not in the bedroom!
(*cough* like the Chief Engineer's skis *cough*)

Our biggest achievement was breaking down the desk. Being an ikea desk, it was modular .
We took one of the smaller end pieces and re-attached the legs and made a desk small enough
to fit in the closet. There's much less surface area to dump junk and we can close the closet door on it when we're done. I still need to convince the Chief Engineer that we should donate larger top of the desk to a homeless family that can use it.  For now it lives in our free storage unit in the basement.

We have a long way to go but I'm pleased with the results and am lounging very comfortably on the couch/bed writing this post. Hopefully we'll make more improvement in the coming weeks.

So what do you think about what we did with the space? Any suggestions for what we could do with it?

A different reason to declutter

Has anyone in the group ever taken a time management class? I don't know about you, but I got a real surprise when I took an online one a few years back (you can take it for free for 2 weeks, I think). I expected the class to spend the six hours talking about schedules and strategies for prioritizing tasks.

Wrong! Most of the class was about decluttering!

The class definitely changed my life. It was the first time I'd realized that I really had to get the junk out of my life. That was in November of 2011. Now it's almost March of 2013 and this month I'm going to have the first test that really challenges whether decluttering has helped me better manage my time.

This month I'm starting the Intensive Outpatient Program at an eating disorder treatment center in our area. It's three nights a week from 4:45-8:30 for 6-8 weeks. Don't forget to include the half hour it takes me to get there and then again to travel home. On Tuesdays I have guitar lessons at night, and on Fridays I swim for 1.5 hours. I'm still working full time. And I have to squeeze in two hours of dietician and psychologist appointments each week. I'm a little busy. Oh, and I made my final goodbye to my Grandmother this week**, so I'm going to have to do all of this while I'm grieving and trying to work out the complicated relationship I had with her. At least I'm already seeing a psychologist every week and we saw this coming for a long time. Fortunately my folks are both in the financial industry sto we can't try to empty out her (uber-organized yet somehow extremely cluttered) three bedroom condo until they finish tax season in April.

No, I'm not trying to play misery poker with any of you. A number of you have probably had weeks and months that were actually worse than this. But this is the craziest 6-week period I've had in a very, very long time so it's important to look ahead and plan how to deal with something that I know will burn me out very quickly. I would love your advice on how to handle crazy times like this.

I've already learned that if I'm not going to waste time on clutter and all of the problems it causes, I need to break a few bad clutter/hoarding related habits in a hurry!

1. Not putting stuff away immediately.  In the time management course, Dave Crenshaw says that you'll gain ten hours a week by avoiding "switch tasking." In other words, don't do a task in pieces. Don't let it get interrupted. Don't come home and drop the handbag on the couch and take a few things out and plan on emptying it out and repacking it later. It will take more time in the end than just doing it immediately. Touch it once, and do it now, do it now, do it now.

2. Put stuff back where it belongs. I don't have the luxury anymore of ten minutes to find my cell phone in the morning. Taking the time and mental energy to put it back in its home and to charge it at night will save me time in the morning. I don't have time to dig my clean clothes, my handbag, the contents of my handbag, my lunch, my keys, my badge and my brain out from under a pile of junk at 6:30 in the morning if I have to leave for work at 7:20.

3. Realize that I'm going to need to de-stress, and plan ways to do it that don't involve shopping, or involve minimal, strategic shopping. New toys are not going to take the stress away from this month or give me more time. Impulse purchases are going to be very tempting this month because I'm going to need to de-stress, and as I lose my eating disorder as a mechanism for coping with stress I know that some other habit will try to take its place. With me it will likely be shopping. So I need to plan days off from work to rest, self-nurturing activities like getting my hair done, and I need to allow myself the occasional, well-thought out purchase so that I don't feel deprived and then end up going on a spending binge.

Every moment I can save by being organized and by making sure that I own less stuff is more time I can spend relaxing, recuperating, and spending time with the Chief Engineer. Who definitely deserves some quality time from me, because yesterday I left the light on in the car and left him stranded when he had to go to work. So yeah, he deserves some positive attention.

What decluttering/organizing habits save you time?


**In a way, this is a blessing. She was in horrible shape on Saturday and in a lot of pain. She's lived a full life, and at this point the end is really the best thing for someone suffering so much. She'll soon be dancing with Grandpop again and that's an incredible comfort to me.

For shame!

Have you ever found something in your home or office and just thought, WTF?!?

I keep a small collection of trinkets on a shelf my desk. I'll show you my workspace in a post later this week--I'm looking for suggestions on how to improve it and what to get rid of! But anyways, I started looking through the trinkets to decide what to get rid of and spotted this.

It's missing a few pieces, and some marketing catch phrases. So let me try again: 

The Desktop Titanic...$6.95 worth of amusement "when you get that sinking feeling!"

Because a disaster where over 1000 people froze to death in icy waters because somebody thought appearances were the most important things is something to compare with small disasters at the office! 

I was born on the 71st anniversary of the Titanic sinking and it's fascinated me since I was a child. My mom got me this little "desktop Titanic,"complete with mini lifeboat, a few years ago. I finally looked at it and realize I can't keep it in good conscience. I have plenty of books that treat the subject with respect. What was left of this little model went in the trash. 

What's your WTF?! item?

Everything but the kitchen sink

I wanted to say thanks to everyone for their support after losing my friend Holland last week. We had a three-day weekend in honor of Presidents' day this week and it seemed like a good way to keep going with life and honor Holland's spirit of joie de vivre was to do something fun. In my case, that was some decluttering!

It's been a long time since I've decluttered or organized anything so I wanted to start with something small that would be a quick and easy project to finish. I hadn't taken a look at the cabinet under the kitchen sink since we moved in last year. It's become a bit of a dumping ground.

Everything squeezed in. Mostly.

Everything on the floor.

It amounted to: a wire basket drawer, a sink plunger, several boxes of trash bags, three vases, two containers of detergent, the ingredients for more detergent, a caulking fun, a paper towel holder, a dustpan, and baby oil for the cabinets (works like a charm!).

I recycled the metal basket drawer that was half rusted. I removed the metal tracks that were screwed into the bottom of the cabinet so now we can actually crawl underneath the sink without hunks of metal digging into our backs when we have to change the filter or fix the disposal. It opened up a huge amount of room. I hung the little dust pan up inside the door. Then I found these.

Granite cleaners and leather cleaners. Shame we don't have a granite countertop OR leather furniture!

All of those were freebies. I took them into work and gave them away. People snapped them up. I don't even know how I ended up with them! Does that ever happen to you? Stuff just sneaks into your house?

Okay, so it doesn't look much better with everything back in. But at least there's a little space and I was able to put a liner down to keep any spills from ruining the cabinet.

I'm happy. Now, to figure out how to keep it this way! How do you keep everything under your sink from getting disorganized? What would you have kept or trashed that I didn't?

May all your hell weeks...

"In this world we walk on the roof of hell gazing at the flowers." — Kobayashi Issa

Eleven years ago today was one of the strangest and most painful days of my life. My now-husband's father had passed away the day before and I spent that Friday morning watching the Chief Engineer bury his father. I got back to school where I was a freshman at a women's college and this was the middle of Hell Week -- a parody of sorority rush week, of sorts. Our college didn't have sororities and hazing wasn't acceptable so we had to make fun of it, of course. As freshman we got to pick a "heller," a sophomore friend who would give us silly stunts to do. It was a rite of passage. And it was insane. And on that day I was not. in. the. mood.

Among other things, I had to run into my heller's Urban Studies class in the middle of lecture and scream "The suburbia's coming to get me and I'm moving to Canada!!" and then run out. In my German class I was to speak only Spanish. A friend of mine was supposed to provide Mystery Science Theater 3000-style commentary for Spanish class, punctuating her statements by throwing baby carrots when the spirit moved her (extra points for hitting the prof.) My best friend sat in lecture with a bottle of vodka that was actually filled with water, and periodically would take a few slugs. My geology prof was also in his first year at our school, so he got helled too, and had to give lecture on a skateboard.

Multiply these antics by 300 students and life on campus gets a little crazy during Hell Week.

The irony of all of this is that it's one gigantic conspiracy. Hell Week starts on a Wednesday and  runs until the following Tuesday. Friday night the seniors gather up all of the frosh and read "bedtime stories" to them (everything from Green Eggs and Ham to the snippets of the Kama Sutra) and then the frosh do group calisthenics in preparation for the annual Saturday 5:15 AM 3k run from our college to a the nearby duck pond. Last one to the pond gets thrown in. It's quite the party, actually.

Most of us were pretty freaked out abut the duck pond run. After all, it's February in PA and effing cold, and the duck pond is frequented by swarms of geese. But when it's all over at the end of the week you get led into a room full of flowers and handmade cards from all the upperclasswomen in your dorm. Only you don't know it's coming so it's a great surprise. You've spent the whole week thinking that it's all about the upperclasswomen enjoying making your life "hell," and then you find out it's really about them having a chance to surprise you with some unforgettable shows of affection in the form of flowers and handmade cards. The week ends with flowers.

I still have the cards in a shoebox in, ironically, that old childhood bedroom in my parents' place. I realized only today that it's still there. Those cards mean a lot to every woman who went to my school. We proudly displayed them outside our doors for the entire second half of the year. The upperclasswomen each year spend a lot of time on them, and they're a way of showing you that you may not be with your family anymore but now your friends and classmates are your family and they really do care and want you to be happy, and that anything hellish will end in beauty if you let it.

I managed to leave the cards at my parents' place when I moved out in a hurry. How important could they have been? They're just an object. And I forgot about them. But did I really forget about them?

No. Today on Facebook all of my college friends were changing their profile pictures to flowers, we were sending each other messages and quotes about flowers, and wishing each other Happy Hell Week like we were back in college. We do this every year for Hell Week, sending each other real and virtual gifts, and quotes about flowers.

It's just another reminder that the stuff isn't important.

My good friend Marta was roommates with Holland freshman year during Hell Week and posted this beautiful memory of her:

"Sometime in February 2002 an email was sent to the sophomores of our dorm that room #321 will categorically NOT participate in the Hell Week. Room #321 was Holland and me. It was against our personal freedom and we were not going to be prisoners of the system and surrender our lives to the madmen (or women). Holland ranted about the oppressions of social ideologies while I in complete agreement nodded and chain smoked in the walkway Arch, and then just when we thought we got away with it.. it started being awesome. And now Holland passed away the week of Hell Week, and I feel like so many memories of my freshman year are coming back, and at the same time, they're gone for ever. 11 years is a really short time, it is too soon in so many ways. Only half of the rebellious #321 left - not sure what to do with this, but sure feels sad."


The flowers we get may die. The cards may get left behind. The friends and family may pass away.

Back to the story that started this post -- The Chief Engineer and I didn't start dating until four years after his father's passing. But we kept in touch in part because a terrible experience bound us together. That Friday morning I learned what it meant to say "when he's cut, I bleed." It's no coincidence that I became bulimic on this Friday 11 years ago. It hurt too much to watch him and that was how I coped. But I'm in treatment now and discovering that I have a really awesome life. The Chief Engineer and I finally got our acts together and started dating, and of course, got married (best decision ever. Love you darlin'!) Once again, something awful somehow turned into something good.

The Hell will end, things will get better, the memories will still be there, and there will be flowers in your heart for the rest of your life. To hell with the stuff. And that's why my friends and I still celebrate Hell Week even though it's been over a decade.

May all your hell weeks end in flower days.

And oh, yeah, may your Fridays have fewer fashion foibles. I didn't forget! Today's Friday's Fashion Fallout for this week: 

yeah, they don't fit. no reason to keep 'em.

Upside down

The world is a little upside down for me tonight. The first of my college friends has passed away.

Holland was the only girl I've ever met with her name. I remember her jumping up during introductions at our dining services training my first week at college and watching her bounce up and down about how excited she was to be at Bryn Mawr. She loved math, had a wicked sense of humor, loved bikes, her dogs, and Austin. She jokingly called herself a "lululemon whore" and made fun of those ridiculous "keep calm and carry on" posters. We never realized how sick she was because she never made a big deal out of it.

The last time I saw her was almost three years ago. I was visiting my husband while he was still living in Austin and we met up for coffee. She was excited to start her PhD in mathematics. I made a silly math joke and she laughed. That's the last memory I have of her. She had such a beautiful laugh.

I'll miss you, Holland.