more japan: neko in kyoto

What a very long week this has seemed, though I can’t exactly pinpoint why. It’s not like there is a huge amount going on right now (well there is, but it is not stuff of the time consuming sort).

I look forward to the weekend where I plan to do not a great deal at all. Though I definitely need to action some of that mindless play which has been lacking in my life. This will be quite challenging because in recent times it feels like I need everything I do to have a purpose or serve a goal.

That time in Japan when I broke the chopstick eating ton katsu.

spring! even the weeds look amazing.

This evening Bessie and I ruthlessly attacked the fabric stash. You might recall that we undertook this exercise back in January.

This time we’ve pared down to almost nothing by asking ourselves very tough questions about whether we would really do anything with the various pieces. And I think we probably need to add a “donate by” date if stuff is still lingering after a year.

What I find really interesting about this second wave of assessing all of our possessions is that we were so sure that we’d culled all the non-essentials earlier in the year. This time around we’ve already taken a car boot load to the charity shop – with at least one more load to come.

I suspect this renewed enthusiasm to divest ourselves of things has quite a bit to do with the trip to Japan and the fact we stayed in one hotel room for 11 days. We had minimal posessions and we managed perfectly well. Plus, of course, encountering  beautiful minimalist spaces – so peaceful and soothing and I want a part of that.

There’s still quite a huge amount to go through – I hope we can keep up the momentum! The current frugal kick does help with this quite a lot – if we’re not bringing it in, we don’t have to get rid of it.

For someone who finds counting so soothing, I’m really terrible with tallying up these things. The last post on my new music acquisitions should have been 4-7/24 (was 3-6, now updated).

To my surprise, I’ve managed to keep this up – though the acquisitions tend to go in chunks. Thankfully I included the word average in there.

Like my reading list, I’ve given up any pretense of aligning this to months / quarters and just post when I remember – this covers June through mid-October:

sex tourists: sex tourists demo
(digital EP)
I really love this. Very very 1980s electronica – New Order(ish), but also kind of lo-fi totally Aus.

la sera: music for listening to music to
(digital album)
First non-Australian music I’ve bought for a while. I’ve never heard anything so like The Smiths before – with female vocals. Particularly time to go which you should totally go listen to. Is pretty great.

the laurels: sonicology
(digital album)
Bit shoegazey, bit psychedlic – a lot fabulous.

i heard a whisper: class of 2015 – october
(digital album)
Strictly not buying new music here. An excellent free mix-tape on bandcamp from radio station RRR in Melbourne – feat. a bunch of really fabulous emerging artists. Will definitely pursue the work of a bunch of them. I’ll also be listening to the other RRR mix-tapes to discover new things.

Again, all bought from bandcamp, because they are awesome.

This is the most revised of all of my 50before50 challenges. Originally it was run a half-marathon, but injury kind of put paid to that. Then it was run 100km in fun runs, but there aren’t realistically enough fun runs to achieve that in the time available. So I settled on the 700km – mostly it seemed more of a stretch than 500km.

This weekend I finally hit the 100km mark. Hurrah! 

Unfortunately this took me 5 months and at current pace I’ll be quite a bit over 50 by the time I hit the 700km goal. 

This challenge is often somewhat at odds with #24: reduce frequency of sports injuries, as I could go much harder if it wasn’t for the terror of hurting myself yet again. 

By my calculations, I’ll need to do 10km a week from now to get there. I feel like this is not entirely unachievable. We’ll see where I end up.

Despite our plans for Extreme Frugality, we had to stop in at ikea this morning to grab two replacement seats for our dining chairs which cracked this week. We’ve had them for years now and to be honest I’m surprised they’ve lasted this long because they were only $25. I was exceedingly pleased to discover that you can now buy just the seat part for $10 rather than having to replace the whole chair.

On the way we dropped off an awful lot of decluttered stuff at the Salvation Army and watched planes while we waited for ikea to open – because we are dorks.

At current rate of progress, we’ll have much more stuff to drop off in a couple of weeks. Hopefully I’ll remember to take along the DSLR and laze about watching more planes for a while.

My ruthless decluttering is not just confined to Real Life, I’m also taking a good hard look at my Imaginary Internet Life too. 

So far I’ve unsubscribed from a bunch of blogs (no, not yours) that had drifted into the mildly annoying or hate read category; unfollowed irritating Instagram accounts; and deleted and unsubscribed from podcasts that were serving only to aggravate me (formerly excellent health & fitness podcasts which have turned all everything-gives-you-cancer, for example).

And yesterday I killed my Twitter account (which I hadn’t looked at for months). 

All of these things have felt pretty great, this stuff can really weigh you down.

There is definitely more of this in my future – mailing lists, unused apps, obsolete files … and don’t even get me started on the photos.

don says this is not hearty enough, which gives me a stellar excuse to take more photos

I’ve had these typewriter keys for maybe 14 years. I pried them off a rusty and broken machine found in council clean-up.

I was all set to donate these to the bower along with the other letters, but couldn’t bring myself to once I’d started mucking about with them. That Q, the J, the 3/4! Such a wonderful typeface.

Sadly, the Y has gone on an adventure at some point in those years. I hope it is having an Ace! time wherever it might be.

I’ll take some more photos and consider my options – while delightful, I really only look at them every few years.

If we weren’t entering a period of extreme frugality, I’d really get myself some more wee blocks to stack. I find the whole process of making wee towers very soothing.

I’m currently reading designing your life and one of the exercises is rating your satisfaction/fulfilment against four measures on a 5 point scale. I scored myself over 4 for work, health and love, but a <1 for play.

This surprised me a bit, but I so rarely do anything just for the fun of it – even running has definitely become part of health for me. I do like to sent myself lots of challenges which can be quite fun, but they’re more about achieving goals and proving something to myself than anything. Measuring and monitoring everything, despite being satisfying, does kind of suck the life out of stuff.

Must investigate how to turn this around and do some activities with no purpose.

hearts! inspired by the excellent katy (aka taxmom)

Part of the very ruthless Japan-inspired decluttering was attacking the two boxes of hardware that I so lovingly organised a few months ago¹

I’ve had these letters for around 12-13 years. I remember scrambling through various boxes and drawers at the bower to grab every letter they had – which is nowhere near a full alphabet.

Why? I have no idea – I really liked the typeface and they seemed like something that might come in useful some day. Not surprisingly they really haven’t – although we did have a couple affixed to an ancient computer of Joan’s shortly after acquiring them and two letters featured in Bessie’s major artwork for her final year of High School.

I seem to be a bit of a magpie when it comes to letters – there are several small stashes I’ve acquired over time from various locations and done precisely nothing with.

My diverse non-complete collection is mostly all being packed up and donated (some re-donated) to the bower (along with a bunch of other hardware bits) for someone else to pick through and delight in.

It’s actually pretty refreshing to make these ruthless decisions.

The challenge will be to keep the momentum up!

xxx

¹ Eeeep! How was that eleven months ago?