To clutter or not to clutter....what would my mother say?

So on my lovely list of plans for this year of 2013, I have decided to devote Thursdays to old memories. I can already tell that I am not going to be so good at it. Today I spent the day at home trying to declutter. I will show you a few shots of my place first to let you know some of what is/was driving me a little nuts.

 

My box of old jeans that are partially cut up to make a jean quilt.

 

 

The top shelves of my yarn mess….when will I ever get some of this accomplished…..?

 

 

I cannot wait until all chances of serious freezing are over so I can take the plethora of kalanchoes to Herreid. I am soooooo tired of them taking over the house. Oh and the pumpkins are sort of annoying too.

Finally, the area that really didn’t bother me all that badly was the area around the tv. It was stuffed with Christmas cards, some of which I haven’t even read because they came after Christmas and James and Paulina opened them and just dumped them in a pile. Well, I decided to tackle that area. I took down all the cards from the wall, and sorted all the cards into a stack of letters, a stack of family pictures, non family pictures and another of cards. Now we can decide what to keep and what to toss. I also took one of our left over cards and cut up the pictures and filled some frames and of all things, I cut some of those little tiny pictures up and now I have pictures in my Black Hills gold lockets. I am sooooo excited about this. I also found some photos that I had made for a large photo frame, and though they aren’t perfect, they are in place and I can look at new photos on the wall and feel like I have accomplished something.

The clutter on the TV stand.

Family photos.

How do I relate this to a memory of my mother. She was always doing this photo collage thing. She was famous for putting random photos into vintage-antique frames. She would often spray paint the frames (drove me nuts that she ruined what I thought were antique-vintage and valuable) Anyway, what I was doing made me think of her today. It is the sort of thing she would have enjoyed. So, for supper I decided to make vegetable soup. I know it won’t taste as good as hers, but it will be the best we have. I also did bread today, but it seems not every day is a bread day. I either botched the yeast or the humidity and warmth wasn’t right for the rising process. No pictures of how that turned out, but hopefully it will taste ok when dipped into the soup.

I probably better get going. I am in the library and have exceeded my hour allotment. There is no one waiting in line, so I won’t get too worried. I just want to say that having some of that mess out of the way really feels good. Clutter is one of the topics of Gretchin Rubin’s book about Happiness and I really think that she is on to something. Clutter, whether in terms of real tangible items or just in terms of things on your mind, is not healthy. Clutter weighs you down and makes you feel awful. It is very stressful and depressing. Toss it, forget it, repurpose it. You won’t believe how much better it will make you feel.

That is all for now. Hope you all have a great day. I am going back to check my statistics. I cannot figure out yesterday. I have been stuck at 6-12 views a day and yesterday there were 67, too weird.

 

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