A Place for My Stuff

Boston Sunday Globe

"She couldn't just throw away the old newspapers; she had to examine them for important information. It would take years to go through all of them, so she avoided the task and went through none of them."

- from the Steketee & Frost book, Stuff

Since I brought up Boston in my last blog post, I thought I'd take a minute to mention the Boston Sunday Globe.  The Boston Globe is one of the major newspapers here in New England.  Their Sunday edition is, like many Sunday papers I suppose, HUGE.  Really, the Boston Sunday Globe is the size of an old VCR.  If you find a hoarder in New England, I would be willing to bet that in at least 90% of the case, you'll find one or more stacks of old Boston Sunday Globes in the home.  That makes for a tall pile.

Fortunately, I've never had this problem myself.  My wife buys it every now and then for the coupons insert, but we're quick about recycling the rest as soon as possible.  But the newspaper seems to be a very commonly hoarded item.  The word comes up over 50 times in the Stuff book.

What makes people save stacks and stacks of newspapers?  I think the quote at the top of this post says it all.  I'm not going to bother to elaborate on it.  At least not this time.

Note to Tourists Visiting Boston

Over the years, there have been many on-line articles and mass-forwarded emails with advice about visiting Boston, or New England in general.  I may have even mentioned some before.  But here are some of my own.

1) Please don't ask us to speak the phrase "I park my car in Harvard Yard", like we're some speech vending machine that was made for your amusement.  Besides, the phrase doesn't make any sense.  You can't get your car through the campus gates into that grassy part known as Harvard Yard, and even if you could, your car would get towed.

2) For that matter, surprisingly few people in Boston itself seem to have a Boston accent.  If you travel just outside of the city to other towns like Revere, well that's another story.  If you're still dying to hear some examples of really thick Boston accents, watch any of the local TV commercials for furniture stores and car dealerships.

3) If you come looking for the Cheers bar (upon which we'll immediately know you're a tourist), you'll be disappointed when you find out that the inside doesn't look anything like the TV show.

4) It is in your best interest if you don't wear a New York Yankees logo.  This is most especially true in South Boston.  I'm not a sports fan, nor have I ever been a sports fan, and I don't have any particular loyalty to the Boston Red Sox nor any hatred for New York things.  However, I know the reality of the situation.  Likewise, I wouldn't wear a Red Sox shirt in Brooklyn.

5) Like all metropolitan areas, we have vocabulary words that are different from ones used in other parts of the country.  I'm not one of those myopic pricks who claims that my region's words are the "right" ones and everybody else uses the "wrong" ones.  However, the difference is there.  Here is just a small sample.

• Town names.  This isn't really a vocabulary thing, but it deserves mention here. Many town names are not pronounced the way you'd expect them to be pronounced.  But don't try to correct the people who live there, claiming that you know the "correct" way to pronounce their town name, and that all of the residents have it wrong.  You will not win.  Here are some examples:
  
  • Gloucester = "GLAW - stir" (not "Glou - chester")
  • Worcester = "WIST - err" (not "Wore - chester")
  • Leominster = "Lemon - stir" (not "LEO - minster")
  • Dedham = "DEDD - um" (not "dead ham")
  • Framingham = "FRAY - ming - ham" (not "framing - um")
  • Peabody = 'pee - budd - ee" (no real stress on any syllable, but certainly not "PEE - bawdy" as in the cartoon dog "Mr. Peabody")
  • Haverhill = "HAYVE - rill" (not "hay - ver - hill")
  • Provincetown = Always verbally abbreviated as "P-Town"
  • Cape Cod = Referred to as "The Cape"

Of course, ending "err" sounds may be substituted with "ahh".

• The 'T'.  This is the subway.  Nobody calls it "the subway".  You may see buses and above-ground trans with the "T" logo, but these are never called "The T".  When you're taking The T, it means taking the subway, period.  The bus is called the bus.  The above-ground train is called the Commuter Rail.  The good news though is that the T is much, much easier to understand than the New York subway.
• Tonic.  You don't see this too often these days as it's more of an older generational thing, as is "Dungarees" (jeans).  But tonic means a soft drink, not necessarily tonic water.  If you see "tonic" on a restaurant menu, then they mean soft drinks, a.k.a. "soda" or "pop".  You can probably still find a waitress who says "For tonics, we got Pepsi, gingah-rale, ah-range, and root be-ah."
• Wicked.  You'll hear this used not as an adjective meaning "evil", but rather as an adverb meaning "very".  For example, "Wow, this tonic is wicked flat!"
• Jimmies.  These are black frosting shavings you put on ice cream, otherwise known as "sprinkles".
• Bubbler.  This is a drinking fountain.  I found out that it's actually a brand name, similar to how many people use the brand name "Kleenex" to refer to any tissue.
• Subs.  These are those sandwiches known by many other names in different parts of the country: hoagies, grinders, po' boys, and so on.  I don't think this is solely a New England thing, but it's worth knowing.
• The Packie.  The liquor store.  I guess it's short for "package store".  What the connection is, I don't really know.
• Frappe.  Pronounced "Frap", one syllable.  This is basically a milkshake.  And we've been saying it for several generations before McDonald's came out with the "Frapp - PAY".

6) My advice to people who want to visit Salem: come visit any time of the year EXCEPT October.  Yes, I know everybody wants to visit Salem for Halloween, but that's just the problem: EVERYBODY wants to visit then.  If you come at any other time of the year, most of the tourist attractions are still there, the massive crowds are gone, and you'll actually find parking.  The same thing goes for Plymouth and November.

7) Massachusetts and Connecticut still have some ridiculous Blue Laws, presumably left over from the times of the Puritans.  For example, in Massachusetts, you can't buy alcohol in a convenience store, and alcohol stores are closed on Sundays.  You also can't buy fireworks in Massachusetts.  However, New Hampshire (a big vacation state for Massachusetts people, and a state with NO sales tax) is another story.  Plan ahead.

I could probably write a whole book on this topic, but that's enough for now.

Stopping Impulse Buying

"Impulse buying" and compulsive shopping is something that shows up rather often among hoarders.  It's not universal, but it shows up frequently enough to talk about it here.  A lot of my own clutter was partially due to simply having a way higher accumulation rate than a disposal rate.  For example, going on used book or used DVD shopping sprees way more often than getting rid of things.  It took me some time to get back into the balance of things, and being a little more critical of buying anything remotely appealing that I'd pick up in a store.

MSN.com posted an article on 9 ways to stop impulse buying.  You can go click on the link to read the original article.  Here are the 9 items they list, but with my own comments on each of them:

1. Follow the time rule.

This is a helpful rule, and it shows up in the "Stuff" book.  Basically if you find something you like, the idea is to wait a little while before buying it.  The "little while" could be anything from half an hour to a month.  Chances are the initial appeal of getting the item will wear off, maybe even to the point where you'll forget all about it because it wasn't worth remembering.
 
2. Don't shop when upset.

I'd expand this concept to "Buy the item because you actually want it, in and of itself. Let need and honest desire for the item, and not some temporary emotion, drive the reason for buying."  And I HATE the new-agey sounding sentiment of the following statement (especially in the way some other people choose to word it) but it's true: sometimes people will buy an item to fill some emotional need at the time, and/or for the feeling they get from making the purchase, rather than because of the item itself. I know this because I've caught myself doing it with different things over the years.  I'd like to think of myself as a creative, intelligent person who's always interested in learning new things as well as learning as much as possible about the 3 or 4 things I'm the most interested in.  There's absolutely nothing wrong with buying stuff for that.  It sure beats spending 6 hours a day playing video games.

The problem, however, was that I ended up buying some things in a desperate attempt to get a new mind challenge or new outlet of creativity, only to not carry through with it.  I remember some time ago buying a caligraphy set.  Learning caligraphy seemed like one of those fun and creative things I'd like to do.  But what happened is the book just collected dust while I tried working on 20 other things.  I even have a number of different musical instruments sitting in my room getting dusty, for the same reason: the thrill of having something new and different and potentially creative ended up being the real motivation for buying it.  Over all, I still don't regret buying them.  But now I'm certainly a little more careful before I buy new things, and asking the magical quesiton: "Do I already have 5 really similar things just like this at home?"
 
4. Don't shop with the wrong people.

I don't think I've ever had a problem with this personally.  Maybe it's because most of my friends are misers.  But I understand why it's on the list.
 
5. Give yourself a splurge budget.

One way to do this is to carry cash on you, and use only the case to make the purchases for a given week or month.  Sounds simple, but it's amazing how fewer and fewer people bother to carry cash these days.

6. Buy only things you can return.

This rule sounds nice, but I doubt how effective it is.  It's more of a pain in the ass to buy an item and return it, than to not buy it in the first place.  And speaking as somebody who has been known to buy harmonicas as well as sheet music, I know that there are some items you simply can't return for legal reasons.

7. Remember to not be fooled by sales.

This one is self-explanatory.  But again, the bargain books, music, and movies is what used to always get me.

8. Keep a list of things you really want or need.

This is probably more effective when it comes to things like grocery shopping.  Most of the time when people go shopping, it's not for anything in particular, so there's no list.  Of course, shopping for the sake of "poking around" is someting that deserves its own place on this list!

9. Don't give yourself access to your money.

To me, this seems really extreme.  But maybe for some people this is what it takes: leaving your credit cards at home or locked in the car, for example.  I sure as hell recommend it for people visiting a casino for the first time, but that's another topic.

Organizing the CD-Rs and DVD-Rs

Over the last month and a half, I've been furiously working on a new book.  No, it's not about "stuff".  But it does have something to do with my two biggest passions in life: music and mathematics.  I've set the end of the month as a deadline for myself to complete it.  That's all I'm going to say about it for now. 

As far as clutter goes, one of my more recent areas of attack were by sticks of burned data CD-Rs and DVD-Rs.  I have these going back at least a dozen years. These days, the CD-R seems to be on its way out.  It's not just audio CDs giving away to mp3 players, but there are lots of other faster, cheaper and sometimes safer ways to store data these days: the exponentially cheaper hard drives and even thumb drives of today, data clouds, bigger webspace, faster internet speeds, etc.  I even read that a 128gb SD card in the works.  Granted, a dual layer DVD-R can store 12 times the amount of data on a standard CD-R, and a Blu-Ray data disc can store eaven more than that.  But I wouldn't be surprised if in the next 10 years, the CD-ROM drive goes the way of the floppy drive.

Regardless, I've still got 10 years worth of data on burned discs, not all of which is doubly backed up on some other source.  Having a 1TB hard drive in the year 2001 was unheard of.  So those files had to go somewhere.  I had a few music mix CDs I burned, too.  It was time to go through these home-made discs and decide which ones to keep, which ones to throw out, and which ones to just extract a thing or two before throwing them out.  Then out of the ones to keep, it was a matter of organizing them.

To help with this, I bought an Atlantic Parade disc holder from K-mart.

It holds 96 discs total in 4 slide-out books, which you can also label in the front.  Obviously this means getting rid of the cases and insert booklets, but since I didn't really have any booklets on my data discs (I typically just wrote the description on the discs themselves with a marker) or anything fancy in the cases, this was fine.  The whole thing is about 7 inches wide.

I've talked before about storing discs in different sorts of holders in order to save space.  I still keep most of my movies in bigger 3-ring binders.  But this is another product I'd recommend if you're not concerned with keeping cases or booklets.

Prince Charles: admitted hoarder?

Some interesting quotes from him in this article:

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/317242/Prince-Charles-My-boys-are-always-pulling-my-leg

"I hate throwing things away. I am always trying to find ways of re-using things. There are bits of this, bits of that everywhere. For example, we’ve had to take curtains down in my bathroom and I was seeing how we could make cushions out of them."

Fridge Clutter Includes What's On Top

In cleaning my refrigerator, I realized I overlooked another place where clutter can build up: on TOP of the fridge itself.

If your refrigerator has cabinets or something directly above that prevents you from using it as a shelf, then you don't have this problem.  Though maybe you want to consider dusting the top once in a while.  Otherwise, I've seen the top of the fridge become a magnet for clutter.  I guess the reason for this is pretty simple: it's easy to put stuff on there because it's a flat surface in a common area, but it's not something you often look up and notice often enough to sort through it.

In my own case, I found at least 3 bags of long-since-expired chips of some variety.  I was happy to toss them.  And from now on I'm going to try to keep this area in mind.  I'd insert some poetic comment here about "not seeing the forest for the trees" and trying to relate that two in interior and exterior of the refrigerator...but I can't think of anything clever.

(On a side note, why does "fridge" have a 'd', but "refrigerator" doesn't?  I checked several spell checkers and dictionaries on this, and that's how it is.  Other people don't understand it either.)

Unearthed from the Depths of the Antarctic (my freezer)

Speaking of freezing food, I've looked at the enormous piles of stuff in my freezer, and said to my wife "You know, we probably have some stuff buried way down in there that we've had since we moved in."  She said that no, that simply wasn't true, because she keeps the stock rotated.  I was still a little skeptical.

Recently, my wife took on the challenge of penetrating into the freezer even deeper, throwing out many things along the way.  She came into the room and said "Kidding.  There WAS something we've had in the freezer since we moved in."  I saw it and grabbed the camera, "Ooh!  Let me take a pic for the blog." "No!" she screamed, "People will think that we're disgusting!"  I pleaded with her until I could finally snap the pic.  Here it is, for your viewing pleasure.  Just don't think of my wife as disgusting or lazy in any way.  She really isn't.  I mean it's not like we left this thing in the living room.

How long should you refrigerate/freeze food?

My wife showed me a rather beat-up paper which she said was one of the most informative things she's ever found on the internet.  It was two lists on various foods and how long they should be kept in the refrigerator and/or freezer before tossing them.  Obviously a lot of food these days comes with an expiration date stamp, but that's not always the case.  Thus, her reason for having this document.

Ironically, the list itself was need of recycling.  So at my wife's request, I hunted down the original articles so that I could print out a copy for her and a copy for her sister.

Thousands of other people have seemingly copied the same contents to their blogs.  I'm just going to give the original links instead.

• http://www.realsimple.com/food-recipes/shopping-storing/food/how-long-can-you-refrigerate-freeze-food-10000001210757/

• http://www.realsimple.com/food-recipes/shopping-storing/freezing/how-long-food-last-freezer-10000000687907/

Of course, it helps to actually put a label on these foods and write the date on them in the first place!

 

Getting to those pots on the back-burner

For those of you who aren't familiar with this English idiom, keeping things "on the back burner" is another way of having a task or project that's on a rather lower priority.  Or at least that's how I end up using it. 

I've talked before about procrastination, which Tony Robbins aptly calls "the silent killer".  In my experience, procrastination is not an uncommon theme with pack rats.  And I don't just mean putting off the decluttering.  One of the biggest reasons for keeping things that aren't really needed is the concept of "someday".  I think I've come to hate that word. Look through the items of a hoarder, and you'll quickly find something that's being saved for something they'll swear they'll find a specific future use for.  It's certainly not the sole reason why some people are pack rats, but I'd say it's more often than not a big one, and like I've said, I've already talked about it here.

When you finally get something done that you've been putting off since forever, it's quite rewarding.  Some recent tasks I've done:

• Setting up the wireless server.  When I moved in to my current apartment, the cable/internet provider also gave me a wireless router so that I could have wireless in my home.  Needless to say, I never got it set up.  I guess in my mind (and in my wife's mind too), it was presumably going to be a long and tedious process that would also take up more room that we didn't have.  Well, I finally went ahead and did it.  And now I'm wondering why the hell I didn't do it sooner!  If you're in this situation yourself, go ahead and do it tonight.  Just follow the directions they give you.  You'll be proud that you did.
• Upgrading memory on my laptop. This is something I'd try doing off an on for the past few years, ever since I bought the Mac laptop used from somebody on CraigsList.  Trying to find just the right memory card that would actually work, was a total pain the ass.  I'd find one at Best Buy, then have to return it because it didn't work.  I'd meet out with somebody on CraigsList who had one, only to find out there that it didn't work when I tried it at their home.
  Finally, I asked a local computer store.  It was already a minute or two past closing time, but they had one.  The manager reluctantly said that he wasn't 100% sure if it would work, and that if I had to return it, it would be for store credit only.  But I brought it home, installed it, and...it worked!  I've now maxed out the RAM in this thing.  It didn't resolve the problem that I thought it was going to resolve, but now I at least don't have the memory quesiton hanging over my head!  And it sure beats breaking down and dropping some insane amount of money at the Apple store.

• Fixed the iPod.  A couple of months I tried using my iPod as an external hard drive to back up some stuff.  It wasn't really going the way I wanted to, so I tried cancelling the process, and ended up corrupting a folder.  Long story short: the iPod still worked, but I couldn't get my computer to recognize it and add the newer music I had bought.  I read everything I could find on-line, trying countless different things. 
  (On a side note, I swear that this is one of the biggest things that separates an alleged computer expert from somebody who claims to be a computer illiterate: the geek actually takes the time to read the help files, search the web, etc. to see if he or she can find an answer to the problem at hand.  99% of the time, this strategy works.  Really. )
  At some point I did get it to work the way I wanted to, but shortly after ran into the problem again.  Finally, I tried working at it again using advice I found from a YouTube clip.  And now, all is well.  That makes another several hundred dollars saved by not paying Apple to fix it or give me something new!
• Breaking out the Carribean coffee.  A few weeks ago I went on a cruise, which included a stop in Jamaica.  I got to taste some really excellent Jamaican coffee there, and bought a pound or two at a fraction of the cost of what I would have to pay back in the states.  I broke down and bought a coffee press.
• Bought the new Van Halen release.  Hell yes!  And I'm glad I didn't settle for the digital download, but went all out and got the CD/DVD set.  Ah, printed lyrics...a former norm that is becoming such a nice novelty these days.
• Dusting, moving, cleaning.  I'm starting to wonder if there are such things as dust pixies which magically leave thick dust in my bedroom when I'm away at work.  Because I'm baffled as to why there's so much dust.  I really don't get it.  I run an air filter too.  Is it just a matter of doing it every day, or what?  But dust, I did.  I dusted.  And dusted.  And dusted.  Then moved furniture and dusted some more.
• Book cases and bureaus.  At this stage, I'd say my ultimate goal is to get the remaining stuff off the floor.  This invovled getting a new book shelf, rearranging the living room set up (which of course is easier to do when you've already managed to clear away a lot of the clutter, otherwise it's impossible), a trip to the trift store (unfortunately closed), a trip to Target (which didn't have what we were looking for), a trip to Big Lots (which DID have a cheap book shelf I bought and screwed together -- despite the fact that the directions had something printed wrong), and a trip to the in-laws to pick up a much needed bureau.  Busy day.  My only regret is not taking enough "before" pictures.

Zits (the comic strip)

Somebody showed me this piece of clutter-related humor recently:

http://www.zitscomics.com/?date=02-04-2012#comic-image