Tag: Digital Hoarding

Extra time

Dee Leave a comment

It’s been a pretty busy day (and this will continue for the next several days until…um…Christmas, maybe? The non-stop time of year has started!).

I did Jesmond Dene parkrun again this morning and took more than three minutes off my time from a fortnight ago – knowing the course makes a huge difference! I then spent a bit of time sorting out the house this afternoon as Geth and I are hosting a Hallowe’en boardgaming session tomorrow, and since then have been working on an article I’m writing for a website.

I’ll be mostly boardgaming tomorrow, but will also be squeezing in a bit of time for working on my text adventure game!

I don’t think I’ve ever been so grateful for the extra hour you get from the clocks going back…

USB sticks
Not an OOTD: just some of my collection of USB sticks. I carry them every time I leave the house, even when running, because I’m paranoid that the house will burn down and I’ll lose my entire life’s work of writing and other computer files (I don’t store stuff on the cloud ’cause I don’t trust it). Carrying them while running is a bit of a pain and I’m hoping to find a better way of doing things at some point.

Today’s earworm playlist:

Michael Land – Lucre Island Lawyers
Marc Almond and Gene Pitney – Something’s Gotten Hold Of My Heart
Ultravox – Hymn
Duran Duran – Secret Oktober
Duran Duran – 911 Is A Joke

The study project begins!

Dee Leave a comment

I finally made a start on the study today…

…and immediately ran into some technical problems.

So I had my wee workstation all set up in the living room, with the scanner and shredder ready to start scanning and shredding all the mountains of paper in the study that I want to keep digitally but not physically.  Except they weren’t.  The scanner/printer we have is apparently set up to scan to Geth’s laptop rather than mine (and I don’t want to be reliant on Geth’s laptop for this project, first because it creates extra work to keep moving all the files, secondly because Geth needs it on days when he’s working from home, and thirdly because Geth never cleans his laptop and so it is super gross and I don’t like touching it).  The shredder, meanwhile, won’t work because it’s jammed from the last time we had to shred a lot of stuff (which I’m pretty sure was when we were still living in Southampton, shortly before we moved to Newcastle, so late 2014?).

I have possibly sort of fixed the first issue, because I found some memory cards in the first of the study boxes that I went through today, so I can just switch the scanner to scan to a memory card rather than a laptop.  As for the second issue, Geth has promised to attempt some drunken maintenance with an old unused plastic card (which was how we fixed it the last time this happened) when he gets back from his work dinner tonight.

Hopefully that will all work, or else emptying the study is going to be trickier than I’d foreseen.

De-hoarding

Dee Leave a comment

Well, I didn’t want to start doing the mega wardrobe cull until I’d hit my Slimming World target, but after weeks of chaos upstairs with having to clamber over stuff and not being able to find anything, I admitted defeat and started putting stuff in binbags and donation bags today.

I’ve come a long way with my hoarding problem over the years, but I still find it hard to let go of stuff, especially clothes.  I think it’s partly because I was so broke for so many years post-graduation – during that time, even a £5 Primark top was a hard-earned purchase, and it feels almost disrespectful to my struggling younger self just to toss the item away, even if it’s old and full of holes.

I’ve been trying to mitigate this by using the digital hoarding method – taking a photo of each piece so that I still ‘have’ it.  I’ll probably never look at these photos again, but knowing they’re there makes getting rid of the physical stuff a lot easier.

I threw out a lot of shoes today.  My previous total of 91 pairs first went up to 95 pairs, because I found four pairs that I thought I’d previously thrown out but it turned out I hadn’t.  I’ve now got it down to 77 pairs, and I reckon I’ll be able to get it down further when I finish the cull job tomorrow.  It’s especially tough to get rid of shoes, because I love shoes, but I’m trying just to keep thinking about the lovely neat shoe shelves I’ll be able to have up in the dressing room (not to mention, I must confess, the shiny new pairs I’ll be able to buy).

The biggest motivation for all this de-hoarding is the fact that I can’t wait for the house to look nice and uncluttered, so that I can finally relax and properly feel like this is home.