Weird thing in dishwasher triggers filing decluttering: a True Story

I was putting something in the dishwasher the other day, when sometime fell down with a clatter. Not a glass clatter, so nothing terrifying, but a clatter. I looked around, and found a rectangular plastic doo-hickey that I did not recognize. I figured it was part of the dishwasher that had fallen down, but it was not clear to me where it had fallen down from, so I put it on the counter above the dishwasher and told R. about it.

R. took a look around, and then looked some more. Then he started looking for a model number on the dishwasher. He struggled. So I went looking for the owner’s manual for the dishwasher. I checked in the kitchen. I checked on the short shelves by my chair in the living room. While I was there, I decluttered and organized the owner’s manuals that were on that shelf. I went upstairs to my office. I checked the file there. I decluttered that file of owner’s manuals, and in addition to recycling about a quarter of the file, I took two out and put them in envelopes that I addressed to be mailed tomorrow. I had sent those items to other people, and figured they my want the manuals to go with.

I went upstairs to look in the filing cabinet there. R. has made it an absolute joy to use those file drawers — taxes in one drawer and house related stuff in the other. Finally, I went into the unfinished space up there, and in the metal filing cabinet I found the dishwasher related paperwork.

I decluttered that paperwork. We looked through it. We decided we could get rid of it all, because by that time, R. had found the model number online, and leafing through the paper manual, the only useful part was the troubleshooting guide and we could get that online as well.

So. Dishwasher woes (which R. was able to correct without any new parts) leads to filing decluttering in multiple filing locations.

Commentary:

Why do we have multiple place to look for paperwork? Actually, this normally works really well. I usually find things the first place I look AND it is usually very close to where I am when I decided I wanted the thing. While centralizing filing would give us a single place to look, it would require us to share management of the files AND it would mean I have to switch floors to find the thing I am looking for much more often.

I was pretty entertained that I was doing exactly what Dana K. White’s book, _Decluttering at the Speed of Life_ advocates for (when decluttering, don’t make it worse than it was when you started the project) but modified by my approach (if I can’t find something, clean until I can). The perspective is ever-so-slightly different, but in a great way. In the past, when I’ve been struggling to find something, it has turned into a Major Project along the way. This contained that impulse relatively well.

But it was only relatively well, because after the dishwasher thing, the Puttering turned into decluttering some kitchen cabinets (applying Dana White’s visibility rule — they don’t _seem_ visible because they have doors, but you are in there constantly, and if you are always shuffling objects you _don’t_ want to get at what you _do_ want, it is cumulatively a lot of effort). I also talked to R. (without any yelling or anything! Yay, me!) about how he stops me from getting rid of things I buy, partly by objecting to me getting rid of them at all (pulling them out of the trash) and partly by objecting to _how_ I get rid of them. He has committed to “trying” to do better at this. I don’t like “try”. I don’t require success. I do not want a bunch of litigation around repeating the offending behavior (“But I’m Trying So Hard!”).

We also decluttered the fridge, including vacuuming the floor of the freezer and R. got down on the floor with a damp towel and cleaned the floor of the freezer. That’s super awkward (you have to take the wire drawer out), and some of the volume / weight in the freezer was R.’s. He’d made some soup a while back and froze it. I had not been super impressed by that soup, so it was definitely His Soup. He decided _he_ wasn’t that impressed by the soup, so he tossed it. We tossed some other things in there, too. Weirdly, getting rid of expired food is easy for me, but getting rid of any food at all is hard for him.

A really long time ago (probably around 2011, give or take), I bought some barley from Eden Foods. It had an expiration date of 2013, and I know perfectly well that it was fine in 2013, and for some period of time after that. However, after around 2015, I wasn’t ever going to eat it, and I tried to get rid of it, and that was stopped. So it has sat in a container in the cupboard for over a decade, _while expired_, and about 8 years of that time, the person who bought it (me) had a high degree of commitment to I’m Never Gonna Eat That or Feed It To Anyone Else, while the person with the issues about getting rid of any food _also_ did not eat it. We had a long conversation about these facts and related issues.

While he was taking the barley out to the compost, I opened up expired pudding mix, sprinkles and so forth. I know, you may be thinking, but they are okay past their expiration — those things are kinda immortal! And you are not wrong. And also, the expiration dates were 2018 and earlier. None of the sprinkles were Ruijters — they were all crappy American sprinkles, from when the kids were really little. But I made sure they were _poured out_ into the trash, so they couldn’t be taken back out in their containers. And then, when R. came back in, I _told him what I had done and why_.

I am learning. Slowly, but I am learning.

He was sufficiently agitated that he decluttered his 4-5 inch stack of Mail I Should Go Through on top of the microwave. I may start using that as a metric for when to trigger another decluttering session.

Tuesday: waffles

I got up early this morning and made waffles. This is very close to a weekly task, and I am thinking I should assign a day of the week to do it. Waiting until they run out is less convenient.

I told T. when he was on his way out the door that I wanted him to come home after therapy and get his laundry started and also we would talk then through whatever he needs to know in order to buy his own replacement household goods like sheets and towels. He wants to be more independent and I want to have less ratty stuff in the house, so this is my first attempt at finding solutions that make us both happy and help him develop more life skills.

Unexpected phone call

R.’s aunt who officiated at our wedding called today; this is a little unusual for her, but not completely unheard of. She led with what was obviously a lighthearted transition bit (I posted on FB about some socks with separated toes and she said she’d found them helpful for toe alignment issues, which I hadn’t even thought of those being helpful for, so, nice to know!).

Then she followed up with an awkward I Understand You Had a Sad Childhood.

I definitely had a sad and abusive and horror show of a childhood, that is true! However, the issue I have is not with the childhood part of the childhood — it’s the ongoing cult-y If You Aren’t a Member Of Our Death Cult We Won’t Have Anything to Do With You, that my family of origin takes way too far even for the organization they are members of. My childhood is in my past, and if my parents and family of origin had evolved as people over the years and were willing to have really any kind of ongoing relationship at all with me — let’s go with _willing to share a meal_, or, when I decline one venue to meet up and my counterproposal is rejected, and so visiting their home is chosen, _ offer a glass of water to my children_. The bar is low. I can work with people. But these people don’t want to work together. [I want to be super clear here. I am NOT cutting these people off! They cut me off. They are cutting me off. It is an ongoing process. I send my dad a holiday card and photo package every year. The only things he has sent me in recent years were pandemic related, generic JW proselytizing letters. As in, “Dear Neighbor”, typed, only personalization is that it is addressed to me. I wish I was kidding.]

I explained that to her, and I was calm and patient and used simple terms and she’s a wonderful person in a variety of ways. And she tried to do the blunt object form of empathy where you go, I obviously can’t really understand your pain but I feel your pain with you. Yeah, no. R.’s family of origin just cannot effectively resist centering themselves. Also, R. and I are still trying to puzzle out what she meant when I summed up the elements of our backgrounds that were in common, and she decided to add, “And I too had problems with my church.” *blink*

Whatever. She said nice things and she meant well. I’m never particularly surprised when people comprehensively fail to either Get It or Respond Appropriately (mechanically saying, Oh My Gosh that sounds so awful I’m so sorry that happened to you is _absolutely appropriate_! It’s a low bar. Truly.). She said something about how amazing I am and I observed — because you know, in this situation, humor is called for! — that there is no way to overstate the truth of Living Well is the Best Revenge. A good life is a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful thing. And the look on the face of the people who have rejected you because you are Team Satan in their eyes, when you continue to thrive and find love and good relationships and quite a lot of money, decades after they were so sure The End Was Nigh, well, to quote a Visa commercial: Priceless.

I am, however, really starting to wonder what the heck is going on. I -suspect- this all is happening because of my son having ongoing text relationships with everyone, and he’s saying things to people about me, and I guess it’s news? The irony, tho, of deciding to step back — and keep stepping back — from a lot of R.’s family. I’m still doing the weekly family zoom, and I’ll be visiting that aunt-by-marriage’s older daughter this summer and I have pretty regular phone calls with her younger daughter, to whom I’m providing some extremely minor financial assistance in accessing complementary health care. I just declined to drive from Warrington to Middletown last week to go see her in person when I was in Pennsylvania, especially since she’s very concerned about her immune system and won’t do any indoor visiting at all, which given the weather could have meant a long drive both ways for nothing. Zoom’s easier, honestly.

Liveblogging Guide to Management Ideas and Gurus

I bought this in 2015, in paperback. It’s a really odd one, because you can get an audiobook version of it (audible) but it does not appear to be available in kindle format. It’s really more a reference book than anything else, _but it is a reference book that is quite readable_, which is why I bought it. I wanted to absorb at a surface level the 2 page summaries of what it is about, because I figured it would help me reading business news more quickly without constantly having to look up terms.

Anyway. It’s 8 years later, and I’ve absorbed a lot of it on my own in the meantime, but I’m once again trying to read books before getting rid of them, so here we are.

First up! Enterprise Resource Planning. The description makes it very clear that I have friends who have engaged in trying to do proto-ERP stuff and who have used SAP (how did I not know that SAP/Oracle products were basically doing ERP? That’s what this book is designed to fix in my brain tho, so, yay! Late is better than never). Also! K.’s data dictionary!

That’s kinda boring, tho. Much more interesting is Rosabeth Moss Kanter.

Best of all so far — I’m in the middle of the E’s — is BCG’s “The Experience Curve”. I’ve been trying to explain this to people! Of course, I’d never heard of it before. Basically, everyone has changed jobs, so everyone is new at their job, so everyone is slow and making mistakes and doesn’t know how to do stuff. Thus, everything is much more expensive (because slow and mistakes) which is contributing to inflation. Once everyone settles in and gets used to their jobs (gains experience) they will get faster and make fewer mistakes and they will know how to do stuff and they will be more productive and that process will be deflationary. It’s probably not worth digging further into BCG’s development of the idea, because it has a bunch of problems in the way they developed it. But I have a term I can throw around! Yay!

I don’t really recommend the book, because it is a bit out of date and it is branded The Economist, and so forth, but it is definitely serving the purpose I bought it for, albeit 8 years later.