Alien Girlybrain

In no particular order:

( Stuff I probably will never do because I'm lazy. )
There are probably more things, but these are the ones I can think of right now.

I’ve been browsing a fascinating site called Room and Room. The site has photographs of young peoples’ apartments in Japan. It’s also got one of the best Flash interfaces for a website that I’ve ever seen. It’s clean and minimalist. A slideshow option would make it perfect.

Anyway, it’s gotten me to thinking. Grace has been on an “uncluttering” kick lately, and we’ve gotten rid of a ton of stuff. Books we weren’t reading got traded on Book Mooch, other goods went to the Bible Tabernacle thrift shop and quite a lot got thrown away.

But there’s still a lot of stuff here. If we were to have to pack up tomorrow and move into a tiny apartment how could we tell the essentials from the superfluous? And what would become of the excess? DVDs and music would be easy enough to manage. Rip the stuff we really care about and sell the physical media, keeping a very select few DVDs and CDs. Books are a little more difficult. Book Mooch would be a logical place to share the excess, although that’s an imperfect solution. The books sit here until they’re requested, and we have a large pile of books sitting here which are in our Book inventory but which nobody wants. I suppose the excess could go to the library’s book store. There aren’t many used book stores around here.

Since we’ve both got laptops we could probably do without the monster-sized desks. The laptops also provide our portal to audio and video these days, so we barely use our TV for anything anymore. It’s tempting to hold on to our various game machines, but seeing as we haven’t touched any of them in at least six or seven months (I don’t remember the last time I used the PS2 for anything other than collecting dust) I think we could dump them, too.

I think the hardest part would be all the little stuff though. I’ve managed to acquire quite a lot of little knickknacks in a very short 42 years. Some of them have meaning to me, some are just just STUFF that I don’t want to get rid of for whatever reason. Maybe it’s nostalgia, maybe it’s my innate pack rat instincts (thanks, Dad!). It will be difficult to part with some of this stuff. The little surfing Pikachuu. My twenty-year-old Bambi figure which I got in college. Our myriad penguins. Grace isn’t as sentimental as I am so she finds it easier to part with stuff than I do.

Some stuff would be very easy to dump though. I have a box full of computer power cords. Do I need them? Not at all. Might keep a couple for spares, but the lion’s share of them are pointless. And there are tons of other old assorted computer cables. They can all go. Old mice, kept because...well, I’m not entirely sure. Cookery magazines I’ve kept because they’ve got one or two recipes I’ve just GOT to have because I might make them one day. Ha! I’m supposed to be going through them anyway. Why not just find the recipes I most want to keep, scan them and then dump the ‘zines?

I think we could make the move. It would involve some tough decisions, but we could do it. I just hope we never have to. :)