30 Days of Happiness: Day 17, Less Stuff

I love baskets.  Nothing creates the illusion of order better than a basket.  When I shove the stuff I haven’t done yet in a basket, at least it is all in one place and unlikely to get lost.  What could be simpler?

Well.  It’s that illusion part that gets me.  For this challenge, I tackled four baskets.  The first one was an overflowing recycling basket, so that was just a warm up.  It did make a big difference in the feel of my office, however.

The next two baskets were full of bathroom stuff.  I tossed out a bottle of hairspray that I bought when I was in Australia in hopes that it might keep my hair from flying everywhere when I took the ferry from place to place.  In my normal life:  totally useless.  I disposed of the fantasy that I’m ever going to establish a skin care regime that involves anything more complicated than washing my face and the bottles that accompanied it.  Travel bottles in unhelpful sizes and shapes?  Gone.  The everyday basket is now clean and usable and the occasional use basket (nail polish remover, sunscreen, stuff for rashes…) doesn’t have anything I will never use again.

The basket on the kitchen island was a nice little black hole.  My garden journal lives there.  All the articles and such that I clipped out are now actually inside the journal, rather than wadded up near it in the basket.  The seed packets are rubber-banded together for planting when it is really spring and not pretend spring.  Recipes to try are clipped together.  All the pens in the pen jar in the basket work.  Recycling, odd leaves, screws to God knows what, crumpled ribbons, a random button, two broken seashells, and a dilapidated feather have been purged.  I got around to putting the things away that were in the basket “for now.”  I found 35 cents and two tacks.

Four baskets down, more to go.