a cup of clutter

[adrian_turtle]

For many years, I've been using the same old set of white plastic measuring cups. The measurements are marked on the handles in raised letters, white on white, and somehow they've gotten harder to read over the years. It's weird, because the cups are discolored enough that there's now a little color contrast when there used to be none at all. But my eyes have deteriorated enough that I find myself confusing the 1/3 and the 1/2 cup measures. Then I have to re-calculate the proportions in the middle, which means extra spoons. (Literally. And dishwashing. And feeling like an idiot.)

So, finally, I bought nice new measuring cups this winter! I saved them for Passover, thinking I would carefully clean my kitchen and change over all the dishes and bake nice things that would be kosher for Passover*. And then after the holiday, I could use them for regular flour and such. (Let next Passover worry about itself.) As it happened, last week I didn't feel like baking anything more complicated than a potato, which does not require measuring cups.

This morning I rearranged my kitchen to the configuration it has 51 weeks a year, with the Passover dishes in the cabinet I can't reach. I put the new measuring cups in the drawer by the sink, and looked at the old measuring cups. Should I throw them away? Maybe I should keep them. Sometimes it's useful to have 2 measuring cups the same size and use one for wet and one for dry. But the old ones are hard for me to use, which means they don't work very well. But it's not like they really don't work. I can use them for backup if I need to...

This, THIS, is why my apartment is so cluttered. This, in a nutshell (or at least nested in a measuring cup), is why I can't get rid of anything. It worries me.



*The rigor of my kitchen-cleaning and dishes-changing varies from year to year. This year was very sloppy. Oh well. Nobody who cares eats from my kitchen during Passover.

Comments

[adrian_turtle]

Sharpie ink is that awkward kind of "permanent" where part of it comes right off the plastic with oil, and then when it smudges on my hands it doesn't come off my skin. Very inconvenient. (In other worse, I tried it. :-)

I go through the same mental process, which is why MY house is so cluttered.
The kitchen drawers are overfull, which is difficult, but somehow it's the uncertainty that's more difficult. So it's nice to know I'm not the only one.

[corylea]

Norman has a brilliant response to "But we might need that, and then we'll feel terrible if we got rid of it!" He says, "I'll put this in a special box in the attic. If you need it in the next year, it'll be right there, and you can have it. If you don't need it in the next year, then we can probably get along without it, and I'll donate it to charity."

Your apartment probably doesn't have an attic, but a box under the bed -- or something like that -- could probably serve a similar function. And if a year is too short, it could be two years or three or five. Put a post-it note on the item with the date that it went in the box, and once a year, give away whichever things are still in the box whose post-its show they're past the keep time that you've set.

Of course, this works for me because Norman is there encouraging me to part with stuff; I don't know how it goes if you have to be your own encourager. :-)