{"id":60,"date":"2008-08-19T02:06:00","date_gmt":"2008-08-19T02:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/travelswithmiranda.uskeba.ca\/?p=60"},"modified":"2016-09-11T11:00:12","modified_gmt":"2016-09-11T08:00:12","slug":"eating-the-elephant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/eating-the-elephant\/","title":{"rendered":"Eating the Elephant"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As the days creep closer to September 4th, I&#8217;m a bit panicked about how much junk, erm, personal possessions, I still need to get rid of. I can&#8217;t believe how huge this house is, nor how na\u00efve I was about how much I&#8217;d already downsized! After the horde left on Saturday, I was left feeling pretty depressed and overwhelmed. I spent Sunday in a bit of a funk as my overworked brain tried to figure out how to deal with what&#8217;s left.<\/p>\n<p>My original thought had, of course, been a garage sale, but I&#8217;ve been convinced that this won&#8217;t be worth my while (mainly because of the neighbourhood I live in). So, I&#8217;ve mulled things over and realised that getting money isn&#8217;t as important as feeling as if my things are going to people who need and want them, rather than just ending up in the trash heap.<\/p>\n<p>I started by contacting someone who had picked up a ton of books from me in the spring. She&#8217;s working on a database project involving books and knows a lot of readers. She had been thrilled to receive the mountain I gave her then and enthusiastically accepted to pick up this week what I have left. That helped me find the second wind I needed to tear through the house and box up the books I have left. I was surprised to discover that I still had a visceral attachment to a lot of them, then chided myself. Those books are ones I&#8217;ve read a million times over twenty years or so. It&#8217;s time for me to read new things!<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve advertised the last bit of furniture on Craigslist and am hoping to get money for my computer armoire and craft hutch. I put two bedside lamps on there and was shocked when someone snapped them up almost immediately. Same thing for a filing cabinet, which I gave to a grateful student.<\/p>\n<p>Extra linens that are still in good condition will go to a Saint-Vincent-de-Paul drop off box. Like batches of things, like empty DVD cases and kitchen supplies, are offered on the local Freecycle-type group.<\/p>\n<p>As for the things that are coming with me, I found a new use for my Ikea Kasset boxes as they will be the perfect fit for the overhead cabinets in Miranda. So, I&#8217;ve got a row of them spread out in the living room and they&#8217;re all divided into categories&#8211;hardware, electronics, bathroom, office supplies, etc.. As I move through the house and gather up odds and ends, I deposit them in the appropriate box. Once that box is full, I start another. Since I can&#8217;t just dump things p\u00eale-m\u00eale into a box now to dump back into a drawer at the other end, because I won&#8217;t have much furniture, this method is working out brilliantly.<\/p>\n<p>In just two hours this evening I could see definite progress, so I&#8217;m actually starting to feel that I might have this buttoned up on time.<\/p>\n<p>12 sleeps left till I move in and 17 sleeps left till I leave!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As the days creep closer to September 4th, I&#8217;m a bit panicked about how much junk, erm, personal possessions, I still need to get rid of. I can&#8217;t believe how huge this house is, nor how na\u00efve I was about how much I&#8217;d already downsized! After the horde left on Saturday, I was left feeling [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-homemaking","category-rving"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}