Transplanting a Seattleite

The electrician arrived! Yay!

There is a lot of early morning banging. So, there’s that. I’m glad, but A. is miserable, and we still don’t know (but will soon, foreshadowing later in this post) when insulation is happening. Obviously, the electrician doing that work means insulation CAN happen. Which is good! Turns out google nest has discontinued the smoke alarms we use, and the replacements through First Alert (boooooo) are not yet available. R. ordered them without discussion, and we don’t even have a shipping date. Reddit is not encouraging on this topic, either. In the event, we can slap any battery powered ones up there we want to. We could get reseller google nest ones, but a lot of that is old stock.

There are a bunch of Ring, Alexa and other integrated smoke alarms, battery and hardwired. Some of them say things like z-wave. It’s clearly going to take a while to investigate and it’s unclear that any of this is useful in the new house, because it’s going to have sprinklers and a fire panel so it probably has commercial everything anyway. I do need to ask some questions about that, clearly.

A. wanted to wash her hair this morning, so a shower got added to the schedule, and we weren’t exactly ahead of schedule. But we did get her through that process. I didn’t have time to do much more than the minimum on Duo.

Later in the day, we got the insulation install date, so that’s something. Of course, that triggered a bunch of implementation on earlier research, because while the VOCs on this stuff aren’t too bad, they are still not compatible with being in the house while the work is being done, or for a certain amount of time thereafter. We also have to coordinate with getting R. to a hotel near Deerfield for the night before his bike race. Complications!

But it’s all sorted out, including a couple dinner reservations. Tomorrow I’ve got a long day with meetings both before and after the usual OAC / MEPFP and walk arounds. I need to figure out my morning schedule some time before I go to bed tonight.

I walked with M. at 1 pm.

Someone finally came over and picked up the two mini flashlights that take one AAA battery each! Yay! Nice guy. He’s a mechanic for another town’s DPW, and loses them all the time. Might as well lose an old one!

ETA:

The guy who picked up the Hue Bloom lights is struggling to get them to work. He’s partway there, and is being nice about it, so I’m trying to help him out. I don’t really know what to think about any of this, especially since FB Messenger is warning me this might be a scam, but I really don’t think it is.

I dusted my room while chatting on the phone with Priestess. That was lovely.

I also transferred the summer skorts and shorts to the main dresser and moved the longer, warmer pants to the secondary dresser in the closet. I really should pare some of this down, and probably will over the course of the summer.

I got out my old Kokoons, realized that I no longer pack a micro usb in my charging bag, went downstairs to retrieve one (I only use the Kokoons on transatlantics), and actually found the cord that originally went with it. That’s a sign that the volume of cords we have around is manageable, and that we’ve saved the right ones. Love it! I grabbed a spare block while I was there, altho I won’t travel with it. The combo induction charger has a usb-a in in the front and that should work fine. Probably should test it some time soon.

Oooh, and someone just came and picked something up from the bin on the porch. R. keeps turning the porch light off, and I keep having to remind him to leave it on. At the holidays, for deliveries. And lately, for late pickups from the bin.

But M and I got a 10 am walk before it hit 80, altho boy was it humid.

R. brought down his Victorinox backpack roller from 2005 +/-. I wasn’t going to list it, and then I realized, Saying I Won’t List It is the beginning of a lot of, and then I listed it and hilarity ensued. So I listed it, and I warned off one of my regulars, and someone is supposedly coming by for the flashlights and expressed interest in the luggage so I figured I’d show it to him but warn him about the wobbly wheel and the worn all the way through parts. It would be perfect for schlepping tools around for a season, but that’s about all the life it has left in it. It could assist in a couple moves, type of thing.

Anyway. I picked it up, and it felt much heavier than it should have, so I opened it up (I’d taken pictures fairly mechanically and the weight hadn’t really registered at that point, at least not consciously. There was a bunch of stuff in there! Which is now on the dining table in the kitchen, waiting for R. to come in from mowing and decide what he would like to do with the stuff that was in there. Ziplock bags including the fancy kind for waterproofing on rides, a clip he uses to keep hotel curtains from having that annoying line of light down where they don’t quite meet, the travel knife in its plastic sheath, a cheap meat thermometer, lanyards. But also a Jansport backpack! A pretty decent one. I should list it, if he doesn’t want it, but he should know he’s getting rid of it, for sure.

I’ve got Big Plans for another chunk of decluttering discourse, that is about making personal metrics explicit. Right now, most decluttering discourse has explicit metrics (sparks joy, useful) and emphasizes that each person must declutter their own stuff, because no one knows anyone well enough to do this for them (not true in obvious edge cases, but these are books aimed at people with the power and will to throw away all the annoying stuff their spouse owns and they need to be warned away because of the probable consequences). The explicit metrics are not personal — and the personal metrics are not explicit.

I don’t know how much one can do with the sparks joy / is beautiful / charms / attracts etc. metrics. Those are Dark Part of the Brain things and making them explicit causes its own problems (Wants Don’t Have Whys). But the utility metrics could use some explicit attention. Is it useful TO YOU. Is it useful TO YOU NOW. WHEN will it be useful TO YOU. If you are keeping it for someone else, WHEN will it be useful TO THEM. Have they already told you that they don’t want it. Etc.

The discovery of a Kanga Room cord management thing that I bought yonks ago, and didn’t realize was still in the house, and which R. has no memory of using, is what made me realize that R. has a “is it useful” metric that doesn’t include “to me, in my future”. So if it WAS useful, it is “Useful”, even if it is not useful to him anymore and probably never will be again. I had no idea this was an issue, because it wasn’t hard moving along the kids clothes and stuff when they outgrew them. But he was very committed — as was I! — to not having more than 2, so maybe that provided an outsized dollop of clarity. Also, I had a path to the Next Kid that he could clearly see, which is very much the approach that is working now.

My hats were finally picked up! I left them out for porch pickup, and of the three items, that was the only bag claimed. Wild!

Also, the person came to get the galvanized water cooler. He wanted it for his chickens. I have my doubts about whether the item that he wanted is the one that he got, but you know what? It’ll be a fun experiment! Delphos also makes automated poultry watering equipment and I suspect that’s what he was hoping this was.

I was ghosted on the flashlights and the corelle and the usb-a extension cords. These are repeat offenders. In theory, someone is coming for the corelle tomorrow morning. We’ll see. ETA: Was not ghosted on the extension cords!!! Someone showed up!

I walked early with M. because it was hot out today. I took A. to therapy, then fed her dinner and went out to Silver Girl with R., where he got the chicken sandwich and fries, and we split the duck fat curry potatoes and I had the Brussel sprouts. I have leftover sprouts, but fewer than I expected. I had the Pink Pony Club, which is like a pink squirrel, but with coconut milk and some other changes (nocino, notably, along with the creme de noyaux and the creme de menthe). I’m feeling good about this Only Have the One Drink strategy.

We’re in the process (around the halfway point in the build part) of building a new home. The architect made some interesting choices along the way that I didn’t fully anticipate would be a problem. To be fair, neither did anyone else. I’m not blaming him. The issues tend to involve the need to locate functional equipment. R. decided he wanted Absolutely No Fossil Fuels, which we didn’t quite attain, because there’s a backup generator if the batteries are inadequate to a sustained winter outage. However, we got pretty close by using ground loop heat pumps. There’s just a lot of HVAC equipment that needs to be in ceilings or walls or floors or closets.

It’s all working out okay — altho I’m still frosty about the loss of the laundry room — and then there was the whole issue with who was going to do the millwork in closets and closet type areas. I hit a point where I just couldn’t seem to get any of the things I wanted (or avoid the things I didn’t want) in the millwork when working with the architect, so I removed that dependency from the build and we went with a different vendor. In the process of doing that, I removed the master bedroom “walk through” closet from the scope of the build; I’m going to kit that out after we’ve been there for a few months or whatever, since we have an overlapping year.

My first plan is Lundia, because it’s all wood, very simple. I figured that was within our capabilities to figure out. Then I ran across Rev-A-Shelf’s new Edge system (so new, it’s not fully available yet), and now I’m not sure what I’m going to do. But I’m also in the process of going through every last thing in my current house (not all at once!) and deciding whether I want to move it to the new house. If I don’t, I’m listing it on FB and getting rid of it now. This has led to some really interesting and enlightening conversations. It has also led to a lot of personal realizations.

There’s about a quarter of the hanging space in my closet that is seasonal/special occasion/wtf. That’s where Christmas themed stuff lives, and my wedding dress, and a very expensive handbag that I never actually use. There are also a number of dresses over there, and I’ve been methodically going through the dresses and things in that lightly / never used section of the closet to figure out what I really never would use again. Last night, a couple renfaire type maxi dresses went into the bag, but a different renfaire type maxi dress turned out to fit great, so I’m gonna wear that for Halloween with a purple witch’s hat. This morning, I pulled out two pairs of weather resistant technical pants that I never wear and tried them on. I figured neither would fit and I’d get rid of both, but actually, one pair fits fine. So I got rid of the ones that didn’t fit and gained a pair of pants that I might actually use since I now realize they fit great (over clothes, which is critical in water resistant pants).

This kind of thing has taken my closet over the last few months from kinda tightly packed to visibly having a bunch of space. I didn’t have a goal, but I’m thinking about having a goal. I’m thinking about figuring out an amount of hanging space that feels easy to keep track of everything in it, and pruning / curating down to that and then staying within that space, even tho it is less than the space I currently have, and then designing the new closet to have that amount of space.

But this is a new idea, so I’m going to contemplate it for a while first.

I decided that we had an excessive amount of charging cords and blocks and so forth. So I listed quite a large number of them on FB Marketplace, and two previous recipients came by and picked up many items. More are due to go out tomorrow. One of the lovely ladies brought us cookies. I can’t eat them because they have butter, but R. says they are yummy.

I ordered a variety of items for Aunt C. to use to aid her in her recovery from surgery — walker accessories and stuff like that.

I’m testing my new travel charging equipment to make sure it really works consistently. The Watch isn’t charging, but it’s fairly close to a full charge (80%) and with optimized charging, sometimes it’s hard to tell whether the charger isn’t working or if the Watch is just sipping very slowly on purpose.

Since we’ll be doing a Europe trip again this year, I’m also trying to minimize the number of adapters I need to bring.

I walked with M.

I did some grocery shopping.

https://www.spauldingdecon.com/blog/hoarding-is-on-the-rise

This is a company that provides cleanup services. Cleaning up a hoard at an apartment building is a service they provide to landlords. You can see where they might develop some real insight as a result.

“This can leave seniors feeling lonely and as if they are separate from the rest of the world. They look for things that can help them to better cope with their feelings of isolation and depression. In most cases, this means collecting more things for the house or apartment. It could be anything from clothing to food to trinkets, and even animals for companionship.”

There’s a lot more there, but it is a surprisingly forthright and compassion description of the issues, that does not treat it as an individual problem but rather as a problem that is the result of a number of specific changes in our society.

I knew that people who hoard don’t need to buy stuff to create a hoard, but it was also very clear to me that things took a turn in the 1990s, and likely that was because there were so many inexpensive things that one could buy versus earlier. While this blog entry does a good job of hitting all the points, it could more clearly lay out the problem. Things are so cheap in our society, that there is no value extraction possible for many things, so the quality of free / abandoned goods is very high compared to what it once was. You put free / abandoned and simultaneously In Good Shape / Nice together, and put that in front of someone with a set shifting executive function problem and I think you almost automatically get a hoard.

ETA:

This is a look at literary representations of hoarding.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9629820/

“ Neither these classical European writers nor their medical contemporaries appear to consider hoarding a medical disorder during their time, but rather a prudent response to the economic circumstances in which most people lived. Hoarding was misjudged from this standpoint until the present when hoarding was seen in situations with a lack of a true economic, historic, or cultural reason, helping to focus attention on this visible disorder.”

You could just as easily conclude the reverse. Hoarding is a prudent response, that has ceased to make sense in our time, and so we treat it as a medical disorder.

I posted an incense burner that I’ve had sitting on my desk for … years. It was a gift, and I don’t burn incense. I put a battery tea light in it, because it more or less fit and looked mildly cool when lit. But I never turned the light on after a few times. It just sat there, being an incense burner that I had zero use for, and reminding me that just because I’ve known someone for over thirty years doesn’t mean they know me very well at all.

Anyway. These days, when my eyes land on something like that, I ask myself a simple question:

“I wonder how fast and how many people would respond if I put it on FB Marketplace for free?”

And it occurred to me that I didn’t have the slightest idea. So I posted it. And like, a half dozen people immediately expressed interest, but when I followed up, crickets. Finally (as in, maybe 12 minutes into this process) someone committed to picking it up tomorrow. I feel confident that whether that person appears or not, it’ll be gone in a couple of days, max.

But that many people that fast was a little unexpected, so I belatedly did a little research. This looks like a Pier One type object, but some of those Pier One type objects got weirdly valuable over time. It is heavy, probably bronze, and says “Made in China” in block letters (English) on the bottom. Supports the Pier One type object hypothesis. It’s a “double ear” pagoda, but it’s round on the bottom so not a cool animal or anything, and it’s only 6” tall. It’s definitely not an antique — if it were, it wouldn’t have English on the bottom. Google lens found me larger / older / nicer versions of the same thing, and Amazon found me crappier incense burners that look quite different. All of which supports the Pier One hypothesis.

The 3rd (?) edition of the Clearing Your Clutter with Feng Shui book was $4.99 on Amazon, so I bought it because I really kinda wanted to revisit that. I read the first one in the late 1990s, and haven’t ever reread it. This isn’t exactly rereading. It’s not starting off great, and I expect it to get much worse as it goes along, so this could be quite a ride.

ETA: Someone came and picked up the offending pink purse that A. kept trying to use and failing (it has that cute but useless shape where the opening is really small, and it gets wider towards the bottom), a lilac handbag which has too short of a strap for me to ever use, and the purple beaded bag like the black beaded bag that came from R.’s aunt and which has never been used. I had originally put A.’s bag out to go to Savers, but like many things, I’ve pulled it back into the house and listed it and it went away that route instead. R. commented that it looked like a very high quality bag, and I remarked that I didn’t keep crap around the house, with the exception of a stuffie that is nearly as old as I am and some paperbacks, ditto, that I keep for sentimental reasons.

I distinctly remember being 19 years old and telling my boyfriend M.J. how I wanted to someday live in a home — it didn’t have to be big, and it didn’t have to have much in it — in which every single item in the home was really, really nice and quite valuable. I think at the time that meant about a hundred dollars (hey, it was the 80s and I was poor). I did recognize at the time that this could not include items of pure utility, but my general thought process was, if you bother to own it at all, and you could have it be the really nice version of something, that’s what I wanted when I was a Real Adult.

I find that kind of memory deeply uncomfortable, altho I’m not entirely certain why.

Anyway. I really only wear crossbody handbags, and I’m tall-ish, and big in a variety of dimensions. The strap cannot be short. Once I realized just how annoying too short straps were on handbags, I decided to Fix That. Step one was buying Tom Bihn bags, and that indeed was a good choice. I really should have listened to K. years ago when she suggested them. Step two was a tape measure, to work out the minimum, and the desired lengths. I was telling R. about some of this today, and he was, why can’t they just make them longer so they’d work for everyone. And I said, look, fashion has long tail energy, and the heaviest consumers of handbags are short, thin women, who often carry a handbag NOT crossbody, and tucked right up under their armpit. If you make it long enough for me, and you halve that length, that won’t work on her. It’s hard to make an adjustment that can do more than half.

Step three is successfully acquiring attractive replacement straps. The bag obviously has to permit replacement straps (not all bags do), but while it’s possible to get straps, it’s not always easy to find ones that coordinate and the metal hardware works aesthetically as well. But I’m going to at least try; I’m waiting for an Amazon order with a couple straps that should at lest be long enough. The good news is that I now understand in a lot of detail what does NOT work for me, so I’ve at least mostly quit buying the wrong things. Mostly; there’s a baggalini I’m still regretting.

My Holy Clothing order arrived! Which, yay! Because I wanted it no later than tomorrow morning, so cutting it close.

Numerous other things arrived, including a broom and dustpan, some cleaner that purports to deposit a slippery layer on glass so that the water beads up and runs off faster, while also simultaneously not containing anything terrifying the way the rainx shower product does. These two purchases are fine, upstanding examples of how decluttering while reading decluttering books leads to re-cluttering. I did move the aging rubbermaid broom and dustpan to the garage for de-accessioning.

In unrelated re-cluttering, A. and I were watching TikTok and bought a massive sipper that has a slot for lipbalm and a place to clip your keys, as well as a straw, a different lid-device that lets you use the whole thing as a cozy and probably nine other features. It’s a little incredible, and a great fade of pink and purple.

A TomboyX order arrived, and appears to be a slightly different style than previously ordered BUT in the correct size, and may actually be better than previous models at least for me.

I drove A. in and picked her up in the afternoon to take her to therapy. R. got an outdoor ride.

I had avocado toast for lunch, using one of the Wholy Guacamole that I bought when we had guests over recently.

Zyrtec and tea also arrived on subscribe-and-save. I definitely needed the zyrtec. I should pre-emptively skip on the tea, tho, because I have too much now.

I talked to A. and to A. (Daughter and therapist, separately to my daughter, then both together) about the decluttering piece of writing that I’ve been thinking about doing, on and off, ever since spectacularly failing to write something about that when I was 43. It’s been a minute. Actually, in literal terms, more than a decade. I’m thinking tackling it as a discourse, rather than tackling it directly as an activity. I know way more about it as discourse, for sure.

There’s nothing to do out there anyway. Conversations (A.) and zoom (I., family zoom, my daughter’s play date) with west coasters reminds me that things are open on Easter over there. Just not around here. Which is fine by me.

T. came by and when R. left, T. parked in the garage. He came in at an angle, dinged the house and scraped the heck out of his front right corner. *sigh*

We did family zoom, which was fine. If I make it to Portland this summer, I want to try Screen Door.

Someone came by and picked up a whole bunch of stuff, notably, the bubble makers and bubble juice and walkie talkies. Hilariously, someone said they’d be by at noon to pick up the bicycle basket, then said 1:15, and then showed up at 11:45. Happy to see him, and he had a bike on the back of his vehicle, so I’m sure the basket will see some use.

I walked with M. I moved that walk twice because of the pickup time changes. I’m sure it all came down to gps predictions being wildly off due to the complete lack of traffic out there.

I wound up listing a bunch of stuff I pulled out of my closet, and someone is coming by tomorrow to pick up a bunch of that, plus the popcorn buckets from a few days ago. I continue to see things in my office and go, why do I still own that? Mostly because I stopped seeing it there. The latest was a pair of Pier One or equivalent tealight holders. Including battery tea lights. I actually gave the rest of the box of battery tea lights to someone who picked up the Kosta Boda Snowball and a couple other crystal tchochkes. I cleared those out because R. ordered a bit purple glass “orb”, looks like a giant eyeball that some social media glassmaker makes. It needed space in the cabinet, and it seemed easiest to just clear some things out.

I walked with M. in the morning, before it was that warm. Still warm tho!

I cleaned both sides of the downstairs bathroom door, and the front of the pantry door. They really needed it. I also cleaned around the lav sink and the kitchen sink and the window above it. I didn’t do a good job, but it’s better now.

I listed some more stuff, but no one actually picked anything up today. That’s okay, tho. I’m contemplating a way to get rid of the largest, cheapest bookcase still in the house. I think this will involve rotate three cases, but I’m trying to get it down to just 2. That will likely require R. to reduce the volume of what’s in the large case, which in the past I would have laughed at the very idea, but lately he has been very willing.

I cooked bacon after R. left for his Rick Berlin show.

I’m currently cooking chicken wings and blondies.

I shopped for a plug in, inexpensive LED front and back lit mirror for the lav. I’ve found one, but I’m going to do the responsible thing and discuss it with R. before taking action. I thought about getting one of the fancy ones like we’re getting at the house, but so far I’m talking myself out of it. Altho that’s why I want to talk to him about it. If he’s game, I will get the fancy one. Those have to be wired, tho.

Oh, the battery in the van died. AAA came out and jumped it and it started, so R. took it to the transfer station and unloaded the contents there. But he doesn’t trust it, so he took the battery out, and drove over to Costco to get a new one and drop off the old one.