Richard’s Personal Blog

My life has become some unhealthily stressful and cluttered lately that I have had to make the decision to purge as much as possible (or at least “practical”). I am a packrat, both physically and mentally, and I’m starting to drown in my own obsessiveness.

Stage One is attempting to address much of the physical clutter, beginning by trying to declutter the attic, the garage, and my office. Granted, fortunately nothing’s so bad as to warrant being featured on the news or in one of those reality shows, but something’s gotta change.

• Fortunately, I grew out of obsessively collecting Beanie Babies several years ago, but the collection of about eight storage bins in the garage and attic has taken up too much three-dimensional space, and the fact that they were never properly inventoried has taken up too much mental space. Just knowing the task was uncompleted for years was itself a burden. Result: 360 Beanie Babies and 80 McDonald’s Teenie Babies are now consolidated into only five well-catalogued bins; more available storage space, three empty bins, and one less daunting task.
• About three vertical feet of collectible newspapers and magazines from the ’80s and ’90s has been reduced to a single storage bin, most of the rest dumped into the recycle bin since the local library (and local college) already had the periodicals in their collections. Result: more storage space, one extra bin, and one less task to hang over my head.
• During World War II, my father bought a massive set of crystal glasses while stationed or on leave in Japan. For a decade I’ve had them stored in the attic in two large cardboard Xerox paper boxes. Now they’re carefully packed in a single storage bin. The master packer that I am, even I had to repack the entire set three times in order to make it fit in that one bin. I even reused some of the 1980s newspapers to replace the older deteriorating newspaper padding. Result: more storage space, and a little more peace of mind due to safer, better storage.
• An overflowing collection of 1960s through 1990s film cameras was reduced to a single storage bin. Basically, I just culled a few of the no-value plastic knock-offs, and I’ll throw them into a single lot on eBay sometime soon. Result: Sure, I knew about the Minolta Autocord (and it’s nice collection of accessory lenses) and the Rollei 35S, but I didn’t realize I had two Argus cameras! Now I know what I’ve got, and it’s nicely packed and catalogued enough to lean back towards sanity.
• Work memorabilia, most of it from the defunct Zoho Corporation, took up three storage bins. I’m still obsessive enough to retain as much unique stuff as possible, but duplicates were taken out and destined for wearing or sale. Granted, I’m still accumulating stuff from my current company, and the storage needs will grow accordingly, but culling what I did still feels reasonably fruitful and not too painful. Result: more storage space, one extra bin (for now), and a few more ghosts dissipated.

So far, that means 15 storage bins have been reduced to only eight. And that’s only about one-fifth of the attic/garage contents that need organizing and purging. More to follow, the sooner the better.

Although I’m not nearly done with Stage One, progress on Stage Two is overlapping recently, and it involves purging unnecessary tasks and mental stresses.

• Lots of websites means lots of maintenance. While I plan to revisit or rebuild them later when time and stress permits, www.georocks.us, www.cortney.us, and coloradish.com have been archived and removed from the web for the time being. Result: fewer websites to stress over. [Yeah, except that whole "archive" thing got screwed up for coloradish.com. Since it was hosted on a separate server, I forgot to back it up before deleting it. Brilliant.]

Granted, I still have another 50 or so websites to consider. And decluttering tasks is not limited to websites, but it’s a start.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 19th, 2008 at 12:17 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.