sholio | (no subject)

I'm pretty sure I forgot to mention this in at the time, but I got a great gift in

brightknightie, a long, plotty casefile story featuring Janette, Schanke and Natalie (with a little bit of Nick). It was fantastic! I also got a drabble of my own by

amilyn for one of my other requests that was simply perfect!

In White Collar fandom,

collarcorner is open for gen prompts of any sort - I knew about the community beforehand, kind of vaguely, because

kriadydragon is on my flist and she mods it, but now that I'm in the fandom, I can play too! And I cannot stop leaving prompts, help. I have so many story ideas right now that I don't have time to write. This is a great place to drop them off! I would be delighted if any of my prompts and requests inspired someone to write something.

I just discovered that there is a fandom love meme and that some wonderful person made a thread for me! ♥ I don't think anyone has ever done that before. Seeing that and the comments made me very happy.

... which I needed, because I'm still cleaning ~~all~~ most of the things.

I've been reading a lot of websites/blog posts/articles on decluttering in the last few days, and generally these are pretty useless for me -- I am a packrat by nature, I have an awful time getting rid of anything that might come in useful one day, and telling me to get rid of all of my [x] just makes me hang on tighter to whatever it is. But I did find a couple of tips that have turned out to be really helpful even for little packrat me, so I thought I'd share:

- For the most part, the stuff I keep is stuff that I think I might use one day (and often it does come in handy, which just reinforces and validates my packrat tendencies). But one thing I know will never be useful and hang onto anyway is memorabilia: childhood toys, ticket stubs and brochures from concerts and museums, junky souvenir mementos that I bought in various places, and such. One website suggested that if you have similar things from the same trip or occasion, keep just one of them (the best or most favorite or easiest to store) and get rid of the others. And it actually works! I'm not managing to do that in every case, but in situations where I have, say, a bunch of souvenir brochures or program books from the same trip, or a whole bunch of Barbie dolls that I used to play with, telling myself that I can keep just one or two for nostalgia and then pack up the rest to be thrown away or donated actually takes away most of the sting.

- Another tip I read somewhere that I have found very useful is to designate a box or container for a certain kind of thing, and then when it fills up, you don't get to have any more of that kind of thing until you make some room. I don't think this would work for everything, but it's turning out to be useful for some of the random non-essentials that I just keep buying and then never using. For example, I got myself a big clear tote box for yarn, and now that I've gone around the house and found all the bags of yarn that I bought for various knitting/crocheting projects, it's full. So I can't buy any more yarn until I actually knit some things with all the yarn I already have.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Those sort of guidelines might work for the "but I might need it someday" type stuff, too. Like, you might indeed need some of X in the future, but do you really need all of it or can just keep some and get rid of the rest. (Like, one example for myself would be boxes. They do come in handy, but do I really need this towering stack of them, especially when I'm not doing much of any shipping these days? Not really. I should weed through them and just keep a few, then put the rest in the recycling.)

*nods* Yeah, actually I should have said, because I've been applying it as a sort of general rule of thumb (at least for items that weren't too difficult or expensive to acquire in the first place) and it's working pretty well. Boxes are one of those things I used it on, actually!

Your decluttering posts were very inspirational. :) Unfortunately we have a large house (for relative values of large, anyway) and just the two of us in it, so there's not much incentive to get rid of stuff until it starts encroaching badly onto the living areas -- which was the point we finally reached, but there's so much of it now that it's a pain to go through.

Huh. I've been feeling the need to declutter a bit, too, but I'm down to mostly dolls and books and craft stuff, and it's hard to let some of that stuff go. But these are good general guidelines, for sure. The "I might need it someday" is the hardest for me, too.

Bravo, and good luck on your continued quest for space! ;-)

Yeah, those sorts of things are the very hardest. I am definitely gonna do a book purge soon ... a gentle one, anyway. *g* I didn't end up getting rid of any of my craft/fiber/art stuff, but I got it much better organized, so I know what I have and can use up what I've already got rather than acquiring new stuff for a while.

we need to start 'pack-rats-r-us'. I'm a horrible packrat too - in collections I have and like you, memorabilia. *sigh*

Yeah, throwing away stuff that I have memories attached to - that's the hardest thing for me. I think that I tend to hang onto a lot of stuff that I really don't need to because of a nagging fear that I'll regret it if I throw it away.