Tie Dying & Decluttering My Memoir

I spent the weekend decluttering again. I had barely done any decluttering this winter, except more recently I have been scanning books again. I have a box and a half full of books to donate to the library.

Declutter Your Books

I found a few of the books I had planned to scan as ePub files on Archive.org so I downloaded those and skipped the scanning part. But most of my books are not on there. Of course, authors want to get paid for their books. I get that. So I’m still working on scanning books… and I bought a couple more books this weekend. I want to stop doing that… someday.

Decluttering This Weekend

Tie-Dying

This weekend I started with pulling out my box of tie dye materials. I have been thinking of donating the dye powders to the church for children to use during Vacation Bible School. The only thing holding me back was a bunch of white clothes sitting in the box. I wanted to dye them first. So I finally did. I liked how they came out for the most part (I’m not showing the so-so ones). My white star could have had better legs here, lol, but it still works. I like having a few patriotic (red, white, blue) shirts around.

There was also a blank tapestry in the box, but I decided against dying it. I will just send it with the box. So I think sometime this week I will move the box into my vehicle and take it to work for the children.

DVD Players

I have a couple of instruction manuals for DVD players that are packed away in the shed. They’ve been sitting on the kitchen counter for months by now, so I went to the shed to try to find the correct DVD player to put the manual with it. I grabbed a box saying DVD player, but it wasn’t the correct one.

Instead it was my old portable DVD (and MP3 CD) player that I had in college (around 2002-2003). It had been in the shed for almost a decade. I plugged it in, it started to charge, and I watched a couple of DVDs on it. Oh, yeah, there were DVDs in there, including one I had been searching for.

There were also VHS tapes… It was time to throw those… but I saw my 1994 People To People Australia tape. Someone was taping our group when we were going around Australia. I haven’t watched it in ages and have no idea what’s on it. I decided to buy a device to record it onto my computer. I do still have a working VCR. But the rest of those tapes are in the trash. I already own them in other formats now.

I looked up how much the DVD player would go for and they’re only about 20 to 40 dollars on eBay. I don’t know what to do with it. I thought about donating it. But, here’s the thing, when my mother was dying of cancer she got some money (I believe from cancer insurance), and bought me and my brother a gift. This DVD player cost a lot of money back in the early 00s.

There are some good memories with it. I would download MP3 songs off Napster and burn a CD with MP3s. Then I took it with me while I walked around my college campus and Pittsburgh neighborhoods. I remember going into the computer lab and listening to music while I “learned to code.” I had to make some program for computer class and I loved just having the music on in the background. It helped me to get into the flow state.

I’m not sure what I will do with it. But you can see the emotional attachment to objects makes it so much more difficult to let go.

DVDs

I mentioned I found some DVDs. I decided to go through my DVD collection and pick out some that I didn’t feel a huge attachment to. I organized some of my DVDs and created a stack of donatable ones. When I bought books on Thriftbooks, I also bought DVDs, so I had to make some space for them.

Other Random Stuff

Sometimes it feels like I’m taking two steps forward and one step backward in my quest to declutter. But I think I have been doing pretty well. I went back out to the shed looking for the DVD player that I was originally trying to find. I found a box that looks like it might be the correct one. But a bunch of fishing poles are in front of it. I took a box next to it down, and went through it.

There were some clothes that I forgot I owned. I washed them. There was a box of “tight jeans” which I finally decided I should just donate. My waist is only getting larger, regardless of what I do. I figure if I ever do fix that problem, having to buy new jeans would be a good problem to have.

There were a few other things that I either threw away or will bring to the church to donate. So overall I got more things out (or I will) than I am bringing in.

The box with tie dye materials was very large. I’ll be glad when that’s gone.

My Memoir

Oh, and I found this memoir of 18-year-old me from when I was in High School. It’s dated February 5th, 1999. I was afraid to read it. I got a perfect score. Why should I be afraid to read it? But it’s just so weird.

I didn’t know my mother was going to die in 4 years. I didn’t know what all would happen in my life after that major event. I sounded so confident that I could see the real world. I wasn’t even close. I was as I say not to say, “naive.” Young. I was just young and inexperienced.

I scanned it and since my scanner has Optical character recognition (OCR), I was able to copy and paste it.