"Yikes, hit the brakes!""You're heading right for the cliff."
Those of you "mature" (old, or in some cases like me, over ripe), those words are familiar as they assured us that once again we would see if Pauline escapes one impending disaster and 15 minutes later find herself once again in mortal danger.
It seems in the last chapter of "Clutter!', we were faced with three burning questions begging for an answer:
- Would two simple folks from New England find happiness in the big city?
- Will they manage to move all their stuff to smaller quarters?
- Who would benefit from the stuff left behind?
As you remember, our problem simply stated is how to squeeze the accumulated stuff from our Mystic home into our apartment in New York City. In other words, a house of roughly 4,000 square feet of stuff had to be squeezed into an apartment of 1,400 square feet.
A challenge to say the least.
We decided the best way to approach a problem of this magnitude was to categorize what we had and then decide what could possibly come with us to New York.
In other words, separate needs from wants. Not easy for the male of the species as there is no line of demarcation between needs and wants. To my eyes, all that I can see I need. Life is simple, but that is yet another reason why man needs a mate.I realize that the accompanying picture might be a stretch, but after all this (once again ) is my blog, so as they say in the 'hood..."suck it up!"
Enough of this blather, back to the categories we found:
- clothes
- outdoor games
- toys
- audio tapes; radio shows, classical, pop, jazz, standards, etc.
- CDs and DVDs; same as above. Duplication is my life.
- books, magazines, journals, newspapers. Not of the tonnage of the Collyer Brothers, but we did have a life beyond accumulating clutter.
- art including furniture pieces and paintings by Philip Barter, a Maine artist.
- Native American art including baskets, and story tellers
The first thing we decided to deal with were the clothes. Since we lived in New England for all four seasons, we had accumulated more than enough. We segregated those few items of clothing that we felt could make the move to the city and started (yet another) pile we designated NYC. What didn't make the cut, went to local not-for-profits that would recycle to their clients. We also had a special "no charge sale" for people who worked or provided services for us during our six years in Mystic.
Books presented a bigger challenge as in our ten years in New England we had accumulated a rather large library between our non-fiction and KIDS related reading material. The biggest challenge of all is the availability of space for this collection in our library.
As you can see in this photo, our living room bookcase in NYC is not made of rubber and therefore unable to absorb any additional books. Our office does contain some bookcases with some available room, but certainly not enough room for a few hundred books. We contacted our local library and they provided us with a solution. They came in and took every book and some went into their collection and others to friends of the library for sale.
I had to face the problem of what to do with the Charlie books when we lived in the city full time. I certainly could not forward books to Bobbie. Unlike Mystic, the local Post Office is a zoo! This meant that I would be at the mercy of the NY Public Library for books unless another solution were found.
KINDLE came to the rescue. Jane had started to use KINDLE and was adding no additional clutter to our lives. If it was good for Jane, why wouldn't it be good for me. We bought a second KINDLE using the same email address allowing us to share our booty. In no time, I had created more clutter, but now it was stored in a portable device and not visible to the naked eye. Just think 1,500 books fit into the KINDLE.
It was like dying and going to Heaven.
Furniture is dispersed around Mystic and as far as we know are in good homes. The "art" furniture and paintings found a new life in our daughters' homes. When we lived in Maine, we started a collection of "art" from a Maine artist, Philip Barter. While I do not consider his work clutter, it sure took on a life of its own. With each passing year our collection kept growing. Our organic garden in Maine should have done as well. A few of his paintings actually made the cut and became part of our NY collection.
Once back in NY,I rolled up my sleeves and worked out my battle plan. The most critical problem I faced was what to do with perhaps 1,000 CDs that comprised my music collection. Realizing that I had to do something about this, I set about transferring all this music to my new computer with oodles of space on the hard drive. This transfer did not happen overnight and proved that "compulsive people do compulsive things" can accomplish any task the transfer took place.
I then realized that once I got rid of the CDs, if anything happened to the computer, I would be out of luck. I purchased a remote hard drive and not only backed up all my music files but all data on the hard drive.
Being by nature a worry wart, I now worried if both the PC hard drive and the remote one died what would I do. Along came a concept called "in the clouds." With much diligent effort, I managed to back up my all my data (including music) to the clouds.
One day AMAZON announced that at no cost, I could back up all my music to their cloud. Before you could say SHAZAM, I was now on the AMAZON cloud.
Talk about clutter...I was creating it at a prodigious rate, BUT it was not my clutter as I could not see it.
Competition is a wonderful thing as in no time at all, Google came along with their own cloud. Since it did not cost me anything, I transferred my music to their cloud.
Now I would have to have a computer melt down, loss of my remote hard drive, my personal cloud and the AMAZON and Google clouds to lose all my music files.
Just when I thought that life couldn't get better, along came PANDORA. A service where I did not need my own library of music. I simply plugged in the artists I liked and in no time at all I had play lists with that artist and others of the same genre.
Just when I thought I could finally stop cluttering up the various clouds, the mother of all clouds descended on me, SPOTIFY. This particular cloud drifted across the Atlantic to our shores. Millions of songs from Classical to Sinatra to Peggy Lee to show tunes to...oh, well you get the message.
I have to come to the conclusion that clutter is good as long as it is not visible.
Welcome to the 21st Century.
Furniture is dispersed around Mystic and as far as we know are in good homes. The "art" furniture and paintings found a new life in our daughters' homes. When we lived in Maine, we started a collection of "art" from a Maine artist, Philip Barter. While I do not consider his work clutter, it sure took on a life of its own. With each passing year our collection kept growing. Our organic garden in Maine should have done as well. A few of his paintings actually made the cut and became part of our NY collection.Once back in NY,I rolled up my sleeves and worked out my battle plan. The most critical problem I faced was what to do with perhaps 1,000 CDs that comprised my music collection. Realizing that I had to do something about this, I set about transferring all this music to my new computer with oodles of space on the hard drive. This transfer did not happen overnight and proved that "compulsive people do compulsive things" can accomplish any task the transfer took place.
I then realized that once I got rid of the CDs, if anything happened to the computer, I would be out of luck. I purchased a remote hard drive and not only backed up all my music files but all data on the hard drive.
Being by nature a worry wart, I now worried if both the PC hard drive and the remote one died what would I do. Along came a concept called "in the clouds." With much diligent effort, I managed to back up my all my data (including music) to the clouds.
One day AMAZON announced that at no cost, I could back up all my music to their cloud. Before you could say SHAZAM, I was now on the AMAZON cloud. Talk about clutter...I was creating it at a prodigious rate, BUT it was not my clutter as I could not see it.
Competition is a wonderful thing as in no time at all, Google came along with their own cloud. Since it did not cost me anything, I transferred my music to their cloud.
Now I would have to have a computer melt down, loss of my remote hard drive, my personal cloud and the AMAZON and Google clouds to lose all my music files.
Just when I thought that life couldn't get better, along came PANDORA. A service where I did not need my own library of music. I simply plugged in the artists I liked and in no time at all I had play lists with that artist and others of the same genre.
Just when I thought I could finally stop cluttering up the various clouds, the mother of all clouds descended on me, SPOTIFY. This particular cloud drifted across the Atlantic to our shores. Millions of songs from Classical to Sinatra to Peggy Lee to show tunes to...oh, well you get the message.
I have to come to the conclusion that clutter is good as long as it is not visible.
Welcome to the 21st Century.
