Collecting Found Objects

Yet another quirk I have is that I maintain a collection of unusual natural items, which includes small things such as cat whiskers and claws, feathers, nut shells (hickory and pistachio are my favorites) as well as larger items such as tree branches and rocks.

I imagine that the objects have a certain energy in them and that I'm a shaman who's able to tap into these energies, combine them and create Objects of Power with them.

At the very least, these objects can be used to adorn a wreath, picture frame or some other craft item.  Cat whiskers also have the very practical value of making good applicators of liquid adhesive or paint when a very fine bead is needed.  I can imagine creating a Cat Mask that uses actual cat whiskers.

Here's a photo of the smallest of my collections.   My daughter keeps the fur in her own collection in her room.  Larger items such as turkey feathers and sheets of bark are in a different collection.  The tree limb is all by itself on the porch.

Do you like to collect anything?  What do you collect and why?

All I Really Want For Christmas

All I really want for Christmas is to finish the Home Office Project, which involves:

• Decluttering.
• Moving out the bookcases.
• Painting the ceiling.
• Painting the walls.
• Rearranging the furniture for auspicious Feng Shui.
• Getting a special Credenza / Hutch piece to help maintain organization.
  

The hardest part is the first item, and that's true of every one of my stalled projects. In this case, I had four copy paper boxes full of college notes, many of which had my Social Security number on them. I cleared that out finally, and the boxes and space that they occupied are now used for our daughter's school work and seven years' worth of income tax records.

We went shopping for this special Credenza / Hutch Piece that I have in mind. I haven't seen anything online, or in a showroom, or in a catalog of a showroom that looks promising. So I might have to find an apprentice carpenter to make one for me. Or I might get by with a set of kitchen cabinets and counter plus a homemade bookshelf hutch. I'm not gonna let that slow me down, though.

Anticipation

As school children, we anticipated the start of a new school year every year. We wondered who our teacher would be and who would be in our class. And every so often, we'd anticipate going to a new school, or if we were lucky, a new summer camp. And of course, we'd anticipate presents for our birthday or a favorite holiday. Anticipation added zest to our lives!

I'm not surprised that the older I get, the less I experience something exciting to look forward to. I've given up the idea of going to school. And I'm less than thrilled about my birthday and Christmas, which is the Square Peg gift-giving holiday. Instead anticipation usually comes to me in the form of worry: what outcome will the lab test have? Or how high will the price of oil rise this winter? Or what if I can't think of something interesting to blog about every day in November? (Hint, write about anticipation!)

But right now I am enjoying the anticipation of moving into a brand-new office on Monday. I've been cleaning out my drawers, which sounds more nasty than it actually is. And I've thrown out boxes of old papers and journals -- an exhilarating accomplishment!

If you're not a hoarder, you might not understand how liberating it feels to throw away lots of stuff. But if you can imagine hiking up a hill with a backpack that contains heavy electronic equipment -- devices that constantly remind you about unfinished work, devices that make loud embarrassing noises that disturb the serenity of your surroundings and keep people away from you, devices that interfere with your compass readings, so you're not sure if you're going in the right direction, devices that are so bulky they leave no room for other things to carry, like an interesting rock, a map or a rain poncho, and it's even hard to breathe because of how much they're pressing into you. Now imagine you're at the edge of a steep cliff. You remove the backpack, open it, and dump everything out over the edge. Now you have a very light backpack with ample room for stuff. You're finally at peace with your surroundings. You can breathe easy. That's how I feel now.

And, I'm looking forward to working in a new space, with new furniture, a new telephone system to learn, and new cubicle mates. (They put us older engineers together.) The network will be ten times faster. We'll have a library plus three conference rooms instead of one room serving as both a conference room and library. The cafeteria is spacious. It's like starting over at a new company!

Anticipation. I like it. How can I experience this more often?

Please Tell Me There's an Appliance Heaven

I’m always trying to eek the very last bit of function from my gadgets and appliances. Duct tape is so well suited to repairing a vacuum cleaner hose, it’s a shame to get rid of the vacuum cleaner, even though it fails to retract its electrical cord. We finally did get rid of the old Hoover canister vac -- the one we bought with our wedding money -- only because the guy who sold us the new Miele offered to take it "on trade-in".

Last month my wife complained to me about the food processor. The only thing wrong with it was that the little plastic locking mechanism broke off the lid. You could still use it just by holding the lid down. But my wife insisted that the blade could somehow fly out like a ninja weapon and impale our daughter or, worse, injure one of the cats. She was adamant, and she threw it out. And when she threw it out, she didn't just toss it in the trash. She did the following:

1. Encouraged the cats to engorge themselves on an extra mid-day meal on the previous day.
2. Scooped out the three extra-full litterboxes (I suspect it was the first time she cleaned them since before she was pregnant with our 11 year old daughter).
3. Cleaned out the garage, filling two trash bags worth of garbage.
4. Combined all the above waste with the "broken" food processor.
   

Nothing kills a good session of dumpster diving faster than a salvageable appliance littered with cat excrement. Otherwise I definitely would've surreptitiously removed that poor little food processor from the garbage and brought it down to my workbench where it would sit in the land of unwanted tools and appliances, with the industrious spiders, just waiting for a handy dad-person to fix it.

It's at times like these that I hope there's an appliance heaven.

---

This post was inspired by
Jenny Ryan's "The Firstborns".

How Hoarding Can Lead to Weight Gain

One of the things I blame weight gain on is hoarding.

People who hoard tend to save things either because they have an emotional attachment to the items, or they think they may need them.

But with food, my tendency is to eat the item before it goes bad. I'll do so even if I'm not hungry.

I may have picked this habit up at an early age. My father was "the human garbage." Mom scraped onto his plate anything we didn't eat each supper. If dad wasn't around, it would go into the garbage if there wasn't enough to make another meal from. The other thing dad would do is cut himself a piece of brownie "just to even it off" as he'd say. And eat just the broken cookies.

Well, the nut doesn't fall far from the tree. Most days, I'll finish what my daughter leaves in her plate (or in the yogurt cup). Sometimes I think I can live off what gets throw out. And I have actually reached into the garbage, mimicking George Costanza to pull out something special to eat. But I've recognized this as a bad habit, and I'm starting to change.

Today my wife complained that the dark chocolate I bought was too bitter (it has cacao nibs). So I wrapped up the unused portion and placed it in the treat drawer. Later she offered the last bit of chocolate ice cream that she was eating out of the container. I took the container away and threw it out.

What eating habits did you pick up from your parents? What habits are you passing on to your children?

Mom's Legacy

When I returned to work, I wondered how I should've spent my bereavement time. By then it was too late, and I felt as though I'd wasted it. I imagined turning back the clock to do it over again. I'd talk with our Pastor. Or look for a copy of Grieving For Dummies. But what's done is done. Sadly, I have no recollection of the three days that I took off from work.

All I really remember about my mother's recent death is the very low-key memorial gathering that my brother hosted. My brother-in-law arranged the catering for it. It was held conveniently on a Saturday, so I didn't even need to take time off from work. No one officiated with a prayer or eulogy. My mother didn't want any fuss, not even an obituary. She got her wish.

This was in stark contrast to my father's passing twenty years earlier. There was a wake and an immensely moving funeral mass, attended by nearly everyone who ever met him. Even my closest coworkers were there. I remember shopping for a casket and grave marker. I tossed rose petals into the grave just before shovelfuls of dirt rained down on the casket.

There was one other vivid memory I have about mom's last days. It was when I visited her in the hospital. She was re-admitted to the hospital because her cancer came back. I hadn't seen her in nearly a year. I'm glad I stopped at the ward desk to ask a hospital attendant to take me in to see her. I did not recognize the old, thin body that was in the bed. I was sure I was in the wrong room. But when her familiar green eyes opened and she spoke, I realized it was her.

She was thin because cancer had spread into her abdominal area. She felt nauseous all the time and couldn't keep food down. She was tired and seemed confused. When I left, I knew it was our last visit together. I walked back to my car overwhelmed with grief.


My brother and sister are cleaning out the house now. I went back a few weeks ago to help.

We learned one aspect of her personality was that she was a professional complainer. We learned this because of scrupulous records that she kept of phone conversations, letters and refund check stubs (many for small amounts like $0.99) with companies whose products were defective in some way. So there were stacks and envelopes filled with carefully kept notes. It was important that we not discard whole stacks without first going through them. Mom kept money in the oddest of places.

She also collected anything that folks might want to use for crafts: yarn, egg cartons, frozen dinner platters, whipped topping tubs, glass jars, pipe cleaners, ice pop sticks, etc. Again, each of these objects needed to inspected. One stack of egg cartons had some jewelery in one of the middle cartons. My siblings must've already tossed the toilet paper rolls, or we have not found the stash yet.


Growing up, we had no inking that it was unusual for a person to keep such collections. In fact, it was really convenient for when we'd have a project that required dozens of buttons or bottle caps. There was not a thing she couldn't produce if you asked her. "Hey mom, where's that old blue and white striped shirt I used to wear about eight years ago." It wasn't a question of whether she still had it, but where she'd put it.

But with the three of us out of the house, mom's hoards grew. So even though my brother and sister did a great deal of clearing of things, the house looked even more cluttered than when I last visited. At one point, she stopped having people over.

All I can do is wonder. Was her life so empty that she had to fill her free time and space with acquisitions? What could she have done for a local school, library or senior center with all that time and energy? How would our lives been different if she had treatment for OCD and hoarding?

At first glance, mom's legacy would seem to be a house filled with hoards. But I see now that her legacy is my own tendency to hoard, which, admittedly is not a good thing. But with that comes the motivation to eliminate my own hoards and fill my free time and empty spaces with love.

Online Support Groups -- Hoarding

There are great self-help resources on the Internet. The online Hoarding support group I belong to is a great example.

When I heard about this support group, I was intrigued.

I took the Rating Scale that I found on the Compulsive Hoarding Website. I scored high enough to meet the criteria, and that's considering how my wife tends to throw out lots of stuff fairly regularly.

So I sent an e-mail request for more information in August of 2006. I got an invitation to apply to the OC Foundation's flagship online self-help group, Hoarding-Cluttering at the end of February. (There is a limit of 103 active members, so I had to wait for a spot to open.) My application was accepted and approved on March 2, 2007, nearly one year ago.

Some of the items I was hoarding at the time included:

• Broken or unneeded appliances, as well as their manuals and the boxes they came in.
• Paper documents, particularly anything with financial or personal information.
• My daughter's writings and drawings. The clothes, toys & books that she's out-grown.
• Magazines.
• Outdated books that I have no use for.
• E-mail.
• AOL CDs, even though I've no intention of joining.
• Plastic bottles, such as 1 gallon jugs for water and cat litter.
• Hazardous waste, such as motor oil, paint thinner, fluorescent bulbs, non-alkaline batteries. (I do bring them to the annual collection if they start to accumulate too much.)

What kind of progress have I made in a year? Well,

• I still don't like to throw out broken appliances. But if my wife does, I no longer pull them out of the trash. I do get rid of the boxes, now.
• I've decided to discard paid invoices that are more than a year old. Due to privacy concerns, I burn these along with the junk mail offers for credit and mortgage refinancing.
• I now scan or take pictures of our daughter's artwork, and even some of her toys. I can then let go of the actual items a lot more easily. Still, my wife is the one that has to discard or donate the items. But I'm eager to get rid of certain old clothes -- the closets are full of the stuff!
• I canceled most magazine subscriptions. I bring to work or recycle the ones I still get, even if I don't think I've read them fully.
• I donated a few books and CDs to the library. I had more CDs slated to go, but my wife exhibited a rare bout of role reversal and removed them from the discard pile. She claimed that our daughter would use the CDs for dancing.
• As for e-mail, I decided it wasn't worth wasting time over. Disk capacity is cheap and plentiful. It's not a problem for me if I have 831 unread messages (957 total) in my Inbox. I do have auto-archiving set.
• I haven't been getting AOL CDs lately. I've used them all for coasters, except two that I hung next to the house to deter a woodpecker from knocking holes in our home's siding.
• I gave many plastic bottles to someone who was designing and making his own robot costume.
• I collect a lot less hazardous waste. I now use all water-based paint, even primer, so I don't need paint thinner. I no longer change my cars' oil by myself. So the occasional watch battery and flourescent light don't take up much room.

So I feel good about the progress I made. But I do have major challenges ahead in the basement, the garage, and both the home office and work office.