Saturday, February 19, 2011

Donations to Goodwill

I started looking at all I had for some reason recently and decided to start donating things to places like Goodwill since there's too much stuff and I'm not using enough of it. I think I hadn't done this before as some of those things were given to me, like coffee mugs, even though I wasn't using all of them. So now I am down to 9 mugs, 2 of them are at the office. But I looked at other things as well, like soup mugs/bowls or ceramic drinking glasses and water bottles, and said they should be donated as well due to lack of use. It was 11 items in all in a shoebox, 12 if you count a seat cushion. I said 3 was too many, so now there's just 2. Doing my best to get down to more of the bare essentials, in some areas it may be easier said than done but I'm trying. Sometimes it means looking inside at boxes and bags to see just what is there, and doing some careful evaluation. Some of this had started before today, where I consolidated all of my pictures waiting to be put in photo albums into one big box instead of a shoebox and 2 bags. Or hats and ties into a gym bag instead of 2 plastic grocery bags. And looking in closets and using the shelving space better. There is a bag of empty bags to go through, actually two- paper and plastic. There are a few other boxes I need to go through, as well as a bag of Christmas ornaments (though I still don't have a big tree to hang them on) but they are now in full vision as they are on my couch instead of in a closet where they are sadly often 'out of sight, out of mind'. Even decided to go down to 1 permanent marker, throwing out one of them as 2 was too many.
  Clothing is another thing to go through, I have done some of this already as well. A shirt and 2 bulkier shirts with collars were put in a big bin at a nearby station and not driven over to Goodwill as it was after 5pm anyway. These will go to another place. I have too many tee shirts and some may be ready to be retired since they may be getting ratty. This is true of even suits, having 2 but not sure how well they fit, but the garment bag they are in is in bad shape, many rips in it so it means looking at a better bag soon, maybe at a secondhand store. Not sure if a duffel bag is needed, wondered about it earlier this week when I got the backpack. When I was going through the closet I noticed some of my childhood stuffed animals and other things were in a nice duffel bag so it means getting things re-arranged a little.
   It was a day of events for me, both were in Minneapolis. Went to a high school basketball game, the road team had a long way to travel, from Superior, Wisconsin, and they lost big 77-42. This was in the afternoon, in the evening I went to a comedy show. The featured act wasn't funny but the headliner was, had seen the headliner before but not the feature. After the show I went to a convenience store nearby since I knew they had Godfather's personal pan pizzas and I liked their pizza when I was growing up in Iowa. When driving home I heard 2 very different songs on my radio- 'At the Twist and Shout' by Mary Chapin Carpenter and 'Live Your Life' by TI and Rihanna. But both of them work for me, I like the Cajun and Creole style music in the former, including a zydeco in the background. In the latter I like being able to chant and emote along with it, 'my life, hey'. I like it for the same reason I liked 'It's My Life', by Talk Talk and later covered by No Doubt. Since I've had to say it was my life before. To some it sounds odd how both songs might work for me, but I have a wide range of interest in music and it reflects my experiences in life. Went from being a small-town Iowan to a big college, then a suburbanite (Chicago) and then the big city after moving from there.

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