Monday, October 13, 2008

Thanks Readers!

Thank you to all my readers. I have decided to end this blog. I hope I have been helpful in your quest for simplicity. I feel however, that I need to devote more time to my art blog Banba's Artful Realm.

Monday, October 6, 2008

Meme Post

Okay, this is new to me, but for my readers I guess this is a way to turn you on to sites I like to read on a regular basis and don't worry they won't all be about garbage even though you know I love to rant about garbage! I have tagged these six blogs and to participate they can:

1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on the blog.
3. Write six random things about yourself.
4. Tag sixish people at the end of your post.
5. Let each person know he or she has been tagged.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.


So here are six things about me:

1. Even though I was an elementary school teacher for 20 years, I never really liked it because other people's kids aren't always so wonderful. You know this if you've thrown a birthday party or two right? I did it so I could be home with me son by 4:00 and during the summers.

2. I am very ambitious: I got married at 22, had a kid at 24, got a masters degree at 26, and bought my first house with my husband at 27.

3. My son and my husband are best friends and business partners. They are my heroes and have allowed me to finally chill out!

4. I love my cat and dog and love to hang out with them. They're laying all over me right now!

5. I really wanted to be a rock star or an artist and now I actually am an artist.

Enough about me! Here are some great blogs:


No Impact Man
This guy is living green in the city. A guilty liberal who swears off plastic, goes organic, becomes a bicycle nut etc.

Life Less Plastic
This blog is all about a gal who tries to live without plastic. It's really fascinating how much plastic we really use!

Granny Miller
This lady writes about her life on a subsistence farm. She cans and has critters. It's like a blast from the past and very well written with lots of great pix.

Bad Generation

I just like this kid. It's nice to know what the next generation is thinking!

The Offended Blogger
This chick is absolutely hilarious!

Paganway
This a cool blog about the pagan lifestyle. Gotta have an open mind for this one, but it's always a good read.

Here's a great artist who is not only living a minimalistic lifestyle, she makes really beautiful clocks and other artwork from  found objects. It's really worth checking out. You could end up with an fascinating clock in your living room!

So I hope you'll check these blogs out cuz I just love 'em!

Thanks to Flat Badger for tagging me. He has lots of cool film clips and interesting articles on his site too!





Friday, October 3, 2008

Don't let empty beer bottles get you down!


Now that I am here in this big house that was obviously enjoyed by a great deal of our 24 year old son's friends, it's time to deal with the garbage they left behind. Now you might say why don't you make him do that? If he were twelve I would, but he's 24 with the responsibilities of a much older man running a construction company. I guess in some ways he has an old soul. Anyway, he's working on our row house getting it ready to rent and dealing with the mess we left in the garage, restaining all the decks, overseeing painting etc.

So, I am dealing with the barrels of garbage that is mixed in with beer bottles and cigarettes, tile, drywall etc. The garbage pickup was yesterday and I was so happy to see some of it go. My main thing is I want as much of it to be recycled as possible. So I picked out two containers worth of bottles and filled the giant recycling bin with cardboard and cans and away it went. Today I will go through more of it and I suspect that after a few weeks I will have gotten rid of it all and then I will change to a once a month pick up because I find that if I recycle and compost that's all the garbage we make. Tomorrow I need to scope out a good spot for a compost pile as well. I left my compost bin for the renters of our row house and I hope they'll use it.

So my message today is don't let the empty beer bottles get you down. We can always recycle them and rock on!

Thursday, October 2, 2008

I'm Here! The Minimalist's Move

Well, I'm here in my new house and in spite of my best efforts to avoid it, I have been stressed out. After all, I thought I was a minimalist! The idea was that I should be able to pick up and move at any time since we are real estate investors and need to be flexible especially in this market! But the new house is beautiful and we're basically moved in. It's a different feeling to be in such a larger house. Ironically, this house is bigger than the one I downsized from when we moved into our row house. However, I am for now resisting the temptation to buy more furniture to fill it up. I just put the wicker garden furniture in the living room for now.

From this move I learned an important lesson. I learned that that moving things into the garage isn't really minimalism! It was the garage that really made the move harder because it was filled with tools, left over paint, and everything that I had pitched from the house to make it minimal.  To make matters worse, I have moved into a house with a garage filled with the remnants of various people's belongings who lived here while our son renovated the house, as well as building materials and tools. But I'm not going to freak out. I'm just going to take it one bite at a time and get rid of as much as I can. 

Freecycle is a great resource for getting rid of things. It's a Yahoo group where people post things they are looking for or looking to get rid of. Of course, this isn't a money maker. But why should we think we should make money on things that are no longer useful to us? Did we think about their resale value when we bought them? Of course not. We bought them to use or just because we wanted them. Be it a painting or a paint brush, most things unfortunately end up in the land fill. The only way not to participate in this travesty is not to buy the stuff in the first place. But for now, I'll just lighten my load by passing it on to someone else.