Ashes to Ashes, Crap to Crap

Clockwise from the top:

1) Business card from my credit union, which I interact with online or via interoffice mail.  Should I ever need to visit in person, I can probably find their location, since it is housed, after all, in my company's main building.

2) Coupon for cat food I do not buy.  (This got recycled)

3) Rubber stamp of new address, freebie from my mortgage company.  Was tempted to keep until I remembered a) I bet I'll be getting (less bulky) free address stickers from some other advertising effort shortly (and I did!) and b) when I do address an envelope by hand, I still like to use the Cross pen that was given to me as a gift when I graduated from high school.  It was "just like Dad's" and I am very fond it it.

4) 2 packets of spiced cider, leftover from Kidlet (who moved out in 2008).  She was visiting recently, but she won't eat anything expired, not even dry goods one day past the printed date.  These have no date stamped on them, but she didn't trust them.  I make real cider when I want a hot cider drink, so these are useless to me.  Won't compost since I don't want to add sugar to the pile.

5) Keychain flashlight with corporate logo.  The battery is failing.  Will toss as after I remove the battery, which I will recycle.

6) Not sure what this plastic thingie is - possibly a holder for some corporate foam logo thingie circa 2003. 

7) Patch kit for the Aerobed.  The Aerobed is rarely used, I don't find it easy to find the leaks in the things, and if I ever really wanted to patch it I bet I could use my bicycle tire patch kit.

Wall-ow

These are things from my late brother's home.  I do like deco, and I do like some Asian art, but I can't say I totally love any of these particular pieces.  The mirror was on the wall of my interior stairway, and the piece on the right was on one of the wall upstairs, but neither piece ever had pride of place.   I have no specific memories of these in his house.  I nearly hung the piece on the left on the wall here in my new house and then asked myself, would I be tempted to buy this if I saw it in a store?  No, so that's the principle I'm applying to all three of these items.  Maybe they'll be a treasure to someone else.

Too Many T-shirts

No pic, just the usual story of too many t-shirts. I've got my favorites I've loved literally to pieces, I've got some functional ones, and then there's all the rest. Some are from college (making them a quarter-century old now - are they "vintage"?; a couple are freebies from work. Most of them are really unflattering on me. I will wear ugly t-shirts to the gym, but I also have some nice gym clothes and only need a few t-shirts for backup/supplemental workout wear. So, I'm saying goodbye to 10 t-shirts, a button-up shirt (corporate logowear feebie), a lightweight nondescript sweater, and a dress that I bought for the sole purpose of attending funerals. Fuck that. Anyway, this stuff is all still wearable, so it's going to the SPCA thrift store.

The Turn of the Screw

The photo is of the old & new versions of the bolts under the sink that hold the faucet to the countertop.  I wound up replacing the bathroom faucet assembly due to a classic homeowner thought process of looking at a small problem and thinking, I can fix this in like five minutes.  The faucet handle (kind of like this one) was grody, so I thought I'd just pop it off and replace it.  The handle I bought was about $8.  But I was having trouble finding the set screws on the adapter piece (they were there, they're just really really small) and I was just taking the old and new ones apart and putting them back and generally fiddling too much until I'd stripped the screw of the old one and couldn't get it off at all, so decided to replace the whole thing.  Faucet assembly = $65.  I do know how to do this, and knew the copper supply lines are brittle, so I was very careful disconnecting them, but broke one anyway, and got to replace that (with flex-hose), too.  Four trips to two hardware stores later, it was all good.

For whatever reason I left he old faucet sitting in my kitchen sink.  The next morning, I was very surprised to see a very very large spider scuttle out of the thing.  It was very very very possibly a black widow.  I am not overly afraid of spiders and have a calm, cool, and collected method for capturing them and releasing them outdoors.  This method was completely forgotten as I invented a new process on the spot which involved hurriedly pulling on my dishwashing gloves, picking up the faucet, running outside, and, I am ashamed to say, flinging the spider over the fence into my neighbor's yard.  Then I headed directly for my outdoor garbage bin and dropped the old faucet in.  I guess that's one way to not wind up hanging onto old,broken things for too long.

On the Utility of Things

Today, the word "utility" is likely to indicate a reference to one of the public utilities providing power, water, sewer services, etc.  I think (especially given the frequently erratic quality of these services) that it is easy to overlook the fact that the root meaning of the word "utility" pertains to "usefulness."  Thus, one might speak of the utility of a particular object.*

I bring this up because one of the most popular phrases from the mouths of hoarders (and everybody else, really; we are talking about a continuum here) is: "I [Someone] might be able to use this someday."  We keep things we may not need at the moment because we expect some future utility out of the object.  This expectation may be based on the fact that the item in question had some utility in the past that it may not have in the present.

Case in point, for me: small paper bags.  Somewhere along late elementary school, it was understood that one brought lunch to school in a paper bag, not in a lunchbox like the little kids.  You could buy a package of paper bags, but my family never did this.  We lived across the street from a small, family-run grocery store, the kind that everyone nowadays laments the disappearance of, and my mother, in between trips to the larger supermarket, would go to this store nearly daily for some small thing.  These small purchases were the source of my small paper bags for lunch, and I was conditioned to save them when shopping on my own.  I suppose this need for a lunch bag existed all the way through high school.

Since then, I have had very little need for these little bags.  Either I wasn't carrying food at all, or I just stuffed the items directly into whatever purse or backpack or messenger bag I was hauling around anyway.  A few years ago, I bought a couple of nylon, insulated bags that are what I regularly use to bring my lunch to work, like the other grownups.

Nevertheless, I continue to save small paper bags.  You see fewer and fewer of them these days, thanks to the nearly ubiquitous flimsy plastic bag, but they are out there, and they do add up if you accumulate just a few a year for, say, fifteen or twenty years. 

This little collection was faithfully moved here to my new house.  Their previous storage location does not have a direct equivalent in my new kitchen, forcing me to ask myself why they are here and whether I was going to find a new place to put them. I resolved to dump 90% of them into the recycling stream as soon as I figured out what category (cardboard?  paper?) they were in. 

Then I read this article that pointed out that you can pop any popcorn in a microwave, in an ordinary paper bag.  Huh.  I tried it and got quite a few grannies, but I think I just need to adjust time & temperature some more.  So, these nearly-doomed items have a new utility for me.  In the reduce-reuse-repurpose-recycle scheme of things, it's nice to recycle, but better to find an alternate use for things if you can, since recycling takes energy. 

Here, let me explain why I prefer the term "utilize" to "repurpose" - when I hear the term repurpose, it evokes images of advice to punch holes in coffee cans to make lanterns, or how to turn an empty tissue box into a recipe organizer/dog toy holder/silk flower vase(!)  Do not get me started on suggestions for empty toilet paper tubes.  Obviously, "repurpose" has alliteration going for it, and not all repurposing ideas are uninspiring and/or tacky, but for purposes of this blog, I'm mostly going to stick with "utilize" when I find something I can convert from clutter into something useful.

*Ironically, I do work at a public utility.  As every day of top-down corporate ass-covering brings us closer and closer to a full-time live-action version of the Dilbert universe, I do have trouble remembering that we are supposed to be providing a useful service.

Containment Issues

So I'm way, way behind on posting about this load that went to the SPCA thrift store almost three weeks ago now.  It consisted entirely of things used to carry or display other stuff.
First up is my soft-sided American Express Centurion luggage.  My memory on how I got these is fuzzy; I think I got them as part of some promotion ("just $99 when you sign up for . . .") and I have had my Amex card since 1989, but I'd swear I hauled these four all four years of college, which would have been earlier.  Huh.  Here we see the large bag and the garment bag.  I think there was a smaller carryon type bag I probably used until it fell apart.  There was also a small zippered document bag.  I've kept paperwork in it, most recently my real estate paperwork, but I switched that to another folder a couple of years ago and probably ditched that document bag at that time.

I cannot possibly have used this luggage since at least 1998, and why would I?  I bought a backpack for European walkabout in 1994, and used it for domestic trips until it was lost by Continental airlines in 1998.  Since then I travel much lighter, with a small rolling suitcase like nearly everyone else.  If that won't hold everything I want, I'll mail things to my destination before I'll check a freaking bag.  I also date last use circa 1998 because that's when I broke up with the guy who probably gave me the cat-shaped brass knuckles (go ahead and Google that, there's more than you'd think) that I found in one of the pockets.

Next are the hard-sided suitcases.  The smaller one, I've had forever, must've been my mother's.  Even when I was a kid I thought it was cool.  As a child, I took it on a sleepover or two, maybe even to visit the grandparents in Oregon.  I may have dragged it to college once or twice as a carryon to shield something breakable.  But who needs the weight these days, am I right, especially since I'm hauling other things I won't check, and it won't hold a laptop.  This suitcase, along with the soft-sided luggage, lived under the stairs for the entire 10 years I lived in the condo.  I can tell because when I went to look it over I found it to be full (sob!) of china, wrapped in late 2001 newspapers. 
The other suitcase is from my brother's.  I never used it - it had a weird smell that took forever to get out, and it would have been even more awkward than the other one to actually use.  And it looks cool, too, but is not in great condition, really.

OK, the bike bag - I bought a pair of these around 1991 when I had a grand plan to bicycle Europe.  I did schlep the works to London and decided that that sort of trip wasn't for me (I returened a few years later and do the more standard backpacking trip).  I used a single bag on and off for a long time for just getting about - did I mention I didn't learn to drive until I was 27?  No idea when I got rid of the first half, but here goes the second.  On the rare occasions I am cycling and need to carry something I'll bungee cord it to the rack and/or use a backpack.
On to the purses, what can I say, except that I can't find the photo of them.  A few years ago I decided I liked a certain red patent leather look and ran with it to the tune of having three of them at one point.  One of these I carried for some time; another was bought "in case" and still had the tags on it.  The third and smallest I used for just one week, when the Kidlet and I drove cross-country in her VW Beetle  and I was traveling light.  (These are all pretty cheap Liz Claiborne handbags.  If Brighton would issue the Seven Snake Bucket in red, I just might shell out for it.)  I'm currently doing fine with a couple of crossbody handbags, a brown one from Highway and a black one from Fossil.

The wicker baskets are probably from the dollar store and I possibly had some vague notion of putting bread in them.  I do actually bake bread sometimes, but I wrap it in plastic so it won't get stale.  On the rare occasions I am serving rolls, those go in the bowls my mother and grandmother served rolls in.  The wire basked is one of those hanging tiered jobs.  I had it up in my kitchen in the apartment I lived in from 1999 to 2001.  Never had it up in the condo, and won't put it up here.

The little shelves are from Ben Franklin's Crafts.  I know this because the price stickers were still on them.  These actually were used for nearly the whole time I was in the condo, and they were fine where they were, but I don't see myself using them in this house, so they are gone.