Lived in, or cluttered

While on vacation we spent some time in the evening watching cable television. This is a rare thing for us, since we don't have it at home. Wipeout is even funnier on the big screen. I nearly peed myself a couple times, restraining myself that there must be some major injuries coming out of that show. Still, they signed up for it.

The major part of the TV diet was HGTV. We got a big kick out of the Property Brothers, and international house hunters. Love it or List it was fun a few times, then got tiresome. There were a few others that were more of the same.

As some of you know, I'm a big fan of the lived in look. We live in our homes. The stuff we use daily should be close to hand. Things like the several books on the go, mobile devices, wine, cookies, that sort of thing. Art on the walls and elsewhere helps make a home comfortable. Cats especially make a home more comfortable, and cat toys make cats happy.

The one thing that became clear from HGTV is that trying to sell a home means being death on clutter. Every show said it, get rid of the clutter. Some of the homes that I thought were nicely lived in, or maybe trending a bit to the clutter side were castigated as being just this side of a catastrophe. Or a dump, which it was in a few cases. I reassure myself that all of it is staged.

Still, I've been looking around our house. The upstairs I think would be termed lived in, more or less, depending on what day of the week it is. Downstairs I've been saying is clutter. Out and out clutter. I've had to wade through it, move it, stack it, try to find stuff in it and otherwise face it. Where, exactly, is the line between lived in and cluttered? I thought most of the for sale homes on the shows, or even the new look to be unbearably sterile. That's just gross.

Our whole society is based around things. Getting more of them. Better things. Bigger things. Meaning we also need bigger houses to put stuff in. Bigger garages to store extra stuff in. Rental storage facilities for even more stuff. Our society is drowning in stuff. Clutter, most of it. I'm struggling with what to do with the pieces of it that are technologically driven. Specifically, books. We have a ton of them. Probably a metric ton. Seriously. If you gave me a few minutes to look some stuff up, I could tell you about how many, but I don't really want to know. I'me guessing on the order of 4000 books down in the basement. Some of the oldest are nearly 100 years old, and falling apart, the pages oxidizing. I doubt they're actually worth anything.

Tell me, what does one do with a complete Encyclopedia Brittanica? This is probably 5 cubic feet of high quality paper that will never be looked at again while it's in my basement. Why would I? Why would anyone? Seriously, what do people do with them?

When we had to tidy up for house painting, I moved all the CD's downstairs. I don't know how many there are. Hundreds, maybe a thousand. I don't know. Most of them are in the computer, and unless I get screwed over on some digital rights thing, those CD's will never see laser light again. It's the digital rights thing that worries me, so I'm not in a rush to get rid of them. However, in the mean time it's just clutter.

Trip souvenirs are a good source of clutter. I brought home a couple T shirts, a hat to keep the sun off my ears, a glass octopus to replace the one Celina broke. There was no end of stuff I could have brought home. At least digital photos take up no space.

My first day back to the office entailed finding it. I was moved during vacation, and I move again on Friday. Sigh. I like this office very much, and I know unless something dramatic changes, I will not like my next office much at all.

My heel and knee are very cranky today. I stretched them yesterday and did a good core workout in the evening. If I was ambitious, I'd do that tonight, but don't go holding your breath waiting for me.

It was suggested to me that the reason Curtis likes to "help" me type is that he wants to start a blog. I'm not so sure about this, and he's being coy upon being put to the question. He undoubtedly has opinions, just not sure a blog is the right forum.