Movin' On

ETA: The captions turned out to be absurdly small, but there are some hyper links within them if you care to mosey around in my internet past. I'm also far too lazy and tired (see closing statement) to change anything about this post other than tacking on this very long and italicized disclaimer. Good night!

Before stepping into the future with smart phones I cleaned out the random, super old pictures on my phone that dated back to 2009. Here are a few in no particular order, chosen for no particular reason.

2010- Pig rocking chair picture taken for my good friend, Jess. She loooooves pigs.

2011- Bathroom art at New Belgium Brewery

2010- A classy wall decoration- yours for a steal at the local thrift store!

Early 2010- It snowed A LOT in Texas that winter

2009- I get all my nutritional advice from gas pump placards at convenience stores. Solid.

2009- Kate works at a nursery, and I told her about how my father used to do this with his construction boots. Officially creeped me out just as much at the age of 26 as it did at the age of 6.

2009- Binkus, cat of wonders.

Christmas 2010- You know you're in a sketch store when they have anti-theft tags on the baskets.

2010- A random bar in Brownwood, right before we moved up to Colorado

2010- Also right before we moved up to Colorado- this child is now 14 months old. He was a few days old here.

2009- Front porch of Jess' apartment in Hollywood, where I lived while writing my thesis.

2009- Halloween shopping. This sums up why I love Jess so much. We ended up going with these costumes.

2009- Last night in Hollywood before returning home to Texas to walk for graduate school.

2010- Bobby and I pet sat the creepiest cat in the universe. This picture says it all.

2009- My contribution to a Christmas potluck.

2010- My favorite gauntlets and a sparkle doughnut.

 I have a sore throat, so now it's bed time. Oh, sweet delicious bed time.

Unencumbered- Thoughts from a Reformed Packrat

 "Frugality is one of the most beautiful and joyful words in the English language, and yet one that we are culturally cut off from understanding and enjoying.  The consumption society has made us feel that happiness lies in having things, and has failed to teach us the happiness of not having things."  ~Elise Boulding

So often in conversations of simplifying, or living with less, or downsizing, the focus tends to be on everything one must give up. To me, living with less and having (relatively) few possessions is not about deprivation- I think an apartment or home that is more empty than full feels amazing. I get so many palpable benefits of doing so that I don't see it as a chore, I see it as something that gives me freedom. When Bobby and I moved this last time, we were able to pack our entire house in about 6 hours, including breaks, singing stupid songs, eating, and dawdling a bit as we sorted things and really took a ruthless eye to a pre-move culling session. Plus, since Bobby was having to physically move, I told him he only had to pack the study and the outside shed, so one person did the brunt of packing and it still went by pretty quickly. We took the following two pictures after we were done. You're looking at everything we own, minus our bed, Bobby's computer desk, and the dining room table- all of which we were still using up until the day of move out.

View from the dining room plus my creepy face

View from the kitchen plus my creepsauce face again

This includes all of the gear and supplies for all of our hobbies- both of our bikes, exercise equipment and yoga paraphernalia, books, yarn/materials/sewing supplies, Bobby's tools and saw, and a crap load of camping stuff. I know, compared to some super simple living gurus, that this is still a lot of stuff for two adults. But I think, on average, it is far, far less. Because of this we don't have to spend more on housing than we need, we don't have to rent storage sheds, and most importantly it is a lot easier to maintain our relatively nomadic lifestyle. Moving is usually not very fun or easy, regardless of how little one owns, but I can tell you, as a reformed pack rat, that it is much more fun and easy without having to break one's back over boxes of crap that are, in the grand scheme of things, useless.



Speaking of useless crap, I'm a big fan of quarterly culling. Four times a year, I sift through my possessions and glean out that which is no longer serving me. Sure, it usually ends up just being a few items, but I'd rather have a few items that I can easily drop off at Goodwill on the way to the grocery store instead of having to dig through mountains of stuff every few years. I've also found that this makes me a lot more ruthless with getting rid of things- if it's not seasonal and it hasn't served me in the last 3 months, why am I paying rent on it? I know that so many people (myself included, for many years) are afraid of getting rid of something and then needing it. I'm here to assure you that I have been ruthlessly bootin' my stuff to the curb (ok, not really the curb, Goodwill or friends who need/ want it) since 2005 and I have never, not once, given away something that I later needed/wanted back. Never. And you know what? If you give something away and you really, really need it then at least you know you really, really need it and you can get another one. Craigslist, thrift stores, and people like me are good places to find free or cheap goods if you really need to replace something you tossed aside a little too hastily.

I know many people have very sentimental attachments to things, for various emotional reasons, but I personally don't, with very few exceptions, which I can count on one hand. To me, the only things I cannot replace in this life are pictures and various very personal mementos like diaries or letters from loved ones. That's precisely why I undertook the photo project that ended up taking far longer than I ever could have imagined. But now it's done, the pictures are safe in digital form, and a huge chunk (maybe half, at last count) have been given away now that I'm not the only person holding the keys to my family's cumulative picture memory box. I'm about to start scanning in my old diaries, so that I can get rid of them as well (most are written in spiral notebooks in pencil which is starting to fade, anyway). Don't get me wrong, I still have a beautiful, small cedar chest that my Great Granny gave me, which holds things like said diaries and mementos. But you know what? I cull from that, too. Because trust me, the things I thought I would treasure forever at 18? Yeah, some of them went straight in the recycling bin last month when I sorted through it.

If you had told me at 18 how very different I would be in terms of material possessions by 22, I probably wouldn't have believed you. And if you had told me at even 22 how different I would be by 28, I wouldn't have believed that, either. The point is that sometimes you have to force yourself to just do it, to start choosing to live with less, get rid of some things, and stop accumulating more things. And very soon after, you might find that you don't miss it at all. I want to reiterate that I am FAR from a simple living guru. There are tons of great blogs out there on that topic, and I certainly can't claim to have whittled my possessions down to 100 things- and I don't desire to (at least not now, we'll see where another 5 years gets me). In the end, I just know that I am so glad that I am not drowning in stuff anymore.

Thrift Stores, or, How Hipsters Ruin Them

I love thrift stores. I started off frequenting them as a teen, when I was trying to make my summer job money stretch as far as possible when buying school clothes. The love continued through college as I began using craigslist and freecycle (not quite thrift stores, but online approximations) and in Japan there was a crazy second hand shop where I acquired all sorts of random things, including a respectable acoustic guitar for only $10.

Upon returning to the U.S., all of the apartments I had with roommates and by myself were furnished with secondhand goods- either loaned to me or purchased from garage sales and thrift stores- and when Bobby and I moved up here to Colorado we furnished our entire apartment for less than $200. Since I haven't posted pictures of our new place yet (and we've been here almost a year, which might require a change in the adjective "new") I'll be doing a series on our apartment and where we discovered our little second hand cast off furniture. In the interim, I wanted to share what I got at the thrift store a few weeks ago when I needed some new winter clothes. I generally dislike sweaters, so I prefer to layer long sleeved shirts under t-shirts with a hoodie on top. I had blown holes in the elbows of several long sleeved shirts, and they were also all about 4 years old. I plan to make them into t-shirts, but in the meantime I needed replacements. Here's what I found...

 I ended up with 3 long sleeved shirts (two had tags on them, all of them were name brand), two cardigans, and a pair of almost brand new Levi's. Total cost- less than $18. I know that thrift stores often conjure up images of dank, dusty, funky little places filled to the brim with random crap, but if you look hard enough you will usually find one that you love. In fact, my favorite thrift store is run by the Salvation Army in my hometown of Brownwood, TX- population about 30,000. They regularly had "Ten Cent Tuesdays" where most of the store's items were on sale for 10 cents.

In light of 10 cent clothing, I'd like to take this moment for a short rant- the recent trend of "thrifting" and "vintage" that is anything but thrifty. I'm sorry, but spending $65 on a vintage dress on Etsy is not "thrifting". Sure, it's used, yes, it's vintage, congratulations, but it kind of defeats the entire point of thrift store shopping. Here are some examples from one of the overpriced, hipster-iffic "thrift stores" in Wicker Park in Chicago...

EXHIBIT A: 6 pairs of used leather boots, in various colors. Folks, you're looking at over A THOUSAND DOLLARS worth of boots. No, I'm not kidding. And yeah, I saw more than one girl with a ridiculous headband and feather earrings and a vintage dress swooning over them, ready to drop over $200 a PAIR for these things. Beat up, stinky, used leather boots are selling for the same amount of money that we spent on everything in our entire apartment. What. The. Hell.

EXHIBIT B: Here's my friend Jo, modeling a familiar 80's looking style jacket. How much was this little gem? Why, only $250! What a bargain! Yay, let's go thrifting! Seriously, I thought I had seen it all until this...

EXHIBIT C: Those. Are. Pants. And they cost $150. Here I'm modeling them as a quirky, "ironic" headdress, with the requisite duck lip pose that is an integral part of any hipster get up.

The point is, there is most certainly a glorious, frugal middle ground between junkyard collection thrift stores and over priced trendy thrift stores. And don't get me wrong- I like vintage, funky clothes just as much as anyone, but I have boundaries as to what I'll spend. Case in point- I found this dress at a thrift store in Japan for $10.

 It was my birthday, so clearly bunny ears were in order...

It also came in handy for a friend's art project.

 

It's in perfect condition, fits like it was made for me, and it's lined with silk. The tag in it was from the 1950's. Something like this would have probably run me into the triple digits on Etsy, and Sweet Hipster who knows how much in a trendy "vintage" shop. But at a real thrift store, it was logically and reasonably priced.

If you've never given thrift stores a try, or if you've been burned in the past, try giving them another chance. There are definitely some really, really bad  ones out there, but if you can find "your store" it's worth all the searching.

5 Weeks and 2 Days, or, I Love My Library

Last week I registered online for the English PLACE exam- the Colorado teaching exam I have to pass in order to be admitted to the graduate program in education. I'll be taking it on April 9th, which gives me a little more than a month to prepare. The PLACE website gives very little information on studying for the test, despite the fact that they have an entire section devoted to "Study Guides". This section was basically just a description of the test objectives, and then they included only 10 sample questions. I got 9 out of 10 right and I thought the questions were easy, which I think bodes well, but I still wanted a specific study guide.

Here's where I profess my love of libraries once again. My local library didn't have any PLACE study guides, but through the Prospector system (a statewide network for inter-library loans) I was able to locate a PLACE English study guide, put it on hold, and it was shipped to me within a week of my request, for free (I realize my tax dollars paid for the library and its services, but you know what I mean, I didn't have to pay extra for shipping). The library e-mailed me yesterday when the book arrived, and I picked it up today on my trip to the grocery store. In addition, when I checked out the study guide I picked up their e-reader pamphlet, and got information on how my library rents out their e-books. The ability to check out e-books from the library was a big part of why we chose the Kobo when we bought an e-book reader.

When I was googling around the internet, there were no free study guide websites that came up, and any reference to books was within a website trying to sell a "study system" to me for anywhere from $50 to $150 dollars. But right down the street from me I received a free study guide, specific to my content area, that I can have for 3 weeks, and then renew online for another 3 weeks. If you haven't checked out your local library, I highly suggest doing so. Your taxes are already invested in it, why not take advantage of the services? Inter-library loans like the one I did are great for getting around the common complaint of "my library doesn't have a good selection", and if you can be patient most of them will come through within a week or two. One of my earliest memories around books is the day that my Granny took me to our teeny little library to get a library card. I was probably about 4 or 5, and I thought I was so grown up because I had a card with my name on it. That was back in the day when library books had a little manila pocket envelope in the front cover, and there was a lined card that went inside. The librarian would painstakingly fill it out, and stamp it with the date it was due. From the joy I got in wandering the library and finding books, to the ritual of checking them out, to the musty paper smell they had, everything about the library was so appealing to me. Even though I'm not much into owning my own books anymore, I do hope that libraries stick around for a long time.

Do you use your local library? Why or why not?

Winter Hot Tubbing, or, A Towel Confession

I know I've said it before, but I can't say it enough. I love that Colorado apartment complexes (or at least ours) have the good sense to leave their hot tubs on during the winter, precisely when you most want to use them. We've been taking advantage of ours a lot the last few weeks, especially at night.
I start off with a beanie, but it's gone within about 2 minutes. Still, it's nice for the walk down in the cold.
It's also good to take your biggest, fuzziest towels. Most of our towels are 30 years old* (seriously, that isn't a joke, when Bobby left his house he just took the old towels he grew up with and has had them ever since) but two of our towels are only 8 years old and they are considerably larger and thicker (there were a lot of advances in the scientific field of bathroom fabrics in that 22 year gap I guess), so those are the hot tub towels. Bobby's modeling one of them here. I'm kind of offended at the way he's implying he's naked behind it. I hope you all aren't scandalized.


*One year younger than Bobby. He did concede that it is possible the towels are "only" 28 years old.