As a child of parents who lived through The Depression I feel like we got some unhelpful mixed messages that were meant to teach frugality and thriftiness but escalated into packrat-itis and an inability to differentiate "useful" from "overkill." I'm seeing so many of the excuses for keeping things articulated in Clutter's Last Stand. I've traveled this path with Aslett before, and was able to identify and eliminate things through the house last year. I found this book on clearance at Half Price Books (someone else de-cluttered!) and am finding it even more helpful. I see it on sale at Amazon starting at about $2. You can look at some of the inside pages, including a chapter on the rational you can use when keeping or discarding gifts. I'll enter some of his remarks here every so often--see if you recognize yourself.

I'm a recycler, I have been for over 30 years, and I've been finding ways to effectively recycle things without simply pushing them off onto others. In some instances this means finding the place for clothes and rags, and in another, it means taking household electronics to the collection site in town so they can determine if they work or if they need to be recycled safely. I compost yard waste, but I'm about to get back into composting kitchen waste (I couldn't keep the dogs out of it, but I'm working on a system out of their reach). Paper, metal, plastic, glass. And trying to buy more glass instead of plastic containers.

Have some of you noticed that the liquid laundry detergents are now more concentrated? It isn't just a gimmick--it takes less water, less plastic, less packing materials and less shipping costs to get that out to consumers. It's about time they figured this out. Cardboard is still probably a better way to go on soap because that box can be recycled and was made of cellulose, not oil.

I may be in diet a holding pattern until the gardening season kicks into high gear, but I think I can lose a couple of hundred pounds next weekend anyway. :)

SRS