Random thoughts on Getting Rid of Stuff

Step one – get rid of stuff.

        We have too much stuff.  In our small house, too much stuff means clutter and inability to find the right thing at the right time.  It is hard to let go of things.  It is OH-SO-HARD to let go of things!  Old jackets (ugly as sin, but so comfortable!), pre-babies pants (I will, I will fit into them, I will!), boxes upon boxes of college-era notes, old lab notebooks, hand-me-downs from family you couldn’t so “no” to, old cameras, roller blades (bought them in college, used them twice).  Do you ever do that - keep things just in case some day – maybe – you’ll need them.  Even though deep down you know the chances of that are approaching zero.  We have half a bookshelf dedicated to fat old textbooks – we haven’t looked at them in years, but what if…  What if we will need them - years down the road?  (Ha!  Who needs textbooks when you have Google!)  But what can I do with a biology textbook?  A chemistry textbook?  Display it as art?  Turn it into a free-floating shelf?  Hmmm…  have to think about it. 

        Toys.  That’s a tough one – we have two young kids and the amount of toys they are accumulating is getting out of hand.  They certainly don’t play with all of them.  Some of the toys are noisy and annoying.  Others are just plain ugly.  Do I let the children decide what to donate and what to keep?  Or do I sneak into their rooms while they are asleep to snatch away a few toys and hope they don’t notice?  I would prefer to keep high-quality toys that are open-ended, can be used in different ways and have a long shelf-life (as the kids grow, they will continue to play with them).  Blocks.  Legos.  Cars.  Trains and train tracks.  Dolls.  Musical instruments and art supplies.  These are the toys our kids play with almost every day.

Things that I would love to get rid of but will not (or my kids will eat me alive): super-noisy garbage truck, half of their stuffed animals, 100 plastic dinosaurs, broken, cheap horrible “Pixar Cars” cars that can’t roll because the wheels don’t turn.  Next to the super-annoying Mater, we have some good-quality toys our kids seem to completely ignore: letter blocks, puppets, memory games…  Come on, kids this is EDUCATIONAL, GOOD-FOR-YOU stuff. I guess the best thing to do would be to hide a pile of toys in the garage and then bring them out one at a time. 

Baby toys (sorter, pyramid and the like) – I guess these we need to look through, keep the best ones for future generations and donate the rest.  We need to go through the kids’ bookshelf and donate some of the books. 

Other things that I would love to get rid of: clothing we don’t wear any more.  Old keys from old labs.  Things that are just taking up space but don’t serve any function (decorative vases, for example).  Kitchen gadgets I haven’t used in the last 5 years.  Tablecloths and placemats of hideous colors (don’t ask how I came to possess these).  Souvenirs that are like tribbles and multiply in geometric progression.

Any advice?  How do you separate junk from gems?  How do you decide what to keep and what to toss?  Do you ever regret getting rid of stuff?  

I’ll keep you posted on (any) progress.

Organizing thoughts

I must be having a mid-life crisis.  Ten years ago, if somebody would have mentioned table runners, organizing kitchen drawers or thinking about do-it-yourself art to decorate the walls – I would have looked at them funny, shrugged and went back to the lab.  I never thought of becoming a home-maker.  Never crossed my mind.  Cooking, cleaning and ironing to keep my family happy?  Ha!  If that’s what marriage was supposed to be about – I’m out! 

        And yet, here I am.  Ten years after “I’ll never get married!” resolution, I have a husband and I have two young children.  All of a sudden, making a house into a home is very important.

        I want our home to be a place of calm.  A place that suggests “relax, leave your worries behind”.  A place that becomes our respite from stress.  A place where we all can be happy.

        I like the idea of simplicity.  Not minimalism, no.  Just comfortable simplicity.  So, I am sitting here and dreaming about organizing, donating, improving, up-cycling, re-using and recycling.  I have converted a couple of shoe boxes into pretty boxes by covering them with polka-dot shelf paper.  Two cute boxes are now keeping my daughter’s socks and underwear from being scattered all around a gigantic drawer.  I organized our pantry – throwing out expired items and trying to group “like” items together in a logical fashion.  I organized the under-the-sink area in the kitchen, leaving only the things we use.  One important –very important – concept I just learned (Thank you, thank you IHeartOrganizing (http://iheartorganizing.blogspot.com/) and Jen Jones – organizing is not an once-in-a-lifetime event.  Instead, I think of it as an evolving process.  It takes a few organizing iterations to get things “just right”.  And then – as our family’s needs change – so will the organization of our home.  Here we have it, a paradigm shift.  Instead of static “Box A goes here, box B goes there and that’s the way it is going to be for the next 20 years”, I will be always looking for ways to improve my home.

        There is a lot of work to be done.  I have a ton of ideas - some of them will go very, very wrong, I am sure!  Time is limited.  Between my three full-time jobs as a mommy, a wife and a scientist there is just about nothing left for personal hobbies.  If I can spend an hour an evening on my pantry…  or a closet…  while doing jumping-jacks (aerobic workout!) and planning tomorrow’s experiments…  Then I’ll be institutionalized by the end of the month.  Multitasking is not my thing.  As a friend’s daughter says, “I am multitasking if I am breathing and blinking at the same time”. 

One thing a time, baby, one shelf at time J

Zanuda

Have you ever had a difficult co-worker? 

I do.

I guess I am incredibly lucky - this is a first-timer for me.  I mean, I've worked with some difficult people, but somehow managed to get along with them just fine.  This person, on the other hand...  He is one of a kind.  I get a nervous twitch in my eye as soon as I see him.  He is not mean, he does not yell at people, or throw temper tantrums, or use abusive language.  No.  He is "zanuda" - a person who talks for hours without delivering any useful information and leaving you confused and bored to tears.  He talks, and talks, and talks, and jumps from one subject to the next, and his take-home message is "I am great.  Everybody else is an idiot.  Everything I do is so brilliant.  I know everything!  And if I don't know it - I'll pretend I do." 

In the past, I've made a mistake of asking him questions/advice and he would give me wrong information.  I don't know if it was out of malice or out of pure ignorance on his part - giving him the benefit of a doubt, I'll go with the latter.  So...  I do my best to avoid talking to him, which is not so good long-term, since we are supposed to be collaborating and the Boss frequently asks "Have you showed your data to N?  Has he told you about his latest finding?".  No and no.

I came into the group when N. was trying to get a certain procedure to work.  It has worked in the past, but about a month before I joined, it started getting funky.  I spend a month and a half on it and finally got it to work again (the problem was with some of the reagents going bad.  N would insist that just because something expired it should not make any difference to the assay... right...).  N then starts changing the conditions of the assay drastically, adding this and that, complaining that people who initially designed this experiment had no clue what they were doing, and claiming that the changes he implemented lead to dramatic improvements.  I am yet to see the data.   I tested one "super-improvement" that he mentioned - and it absolutely did not work.

There is still a chance the guy has a streak of brilliance somewhere deep inside, and is just a horrible communicator.  Or maybe not.  As another colleague said: the jury is still out on that one.