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

[redbird]

This all makes sense.

And yes, you should get rid of them (not that I'm very good at this either).

[corylea]

I go through the same mental process, which is why MY house is so cluttered. :-)

Have you considered taking a Sharpie marker and going over the raised letters with it?

[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. :-)

[anne]

Same! I had a burst of terror after cleaning out Parenthome, and I managed to take a lot of stuff to the thrift store. (But what if I need it? A different and therefore interesting terror!) (No, I'm not completely convinced either. But it's a start.)

[adrian_turtle]

Oh, I am having nightmares about these things after visiting my mother's house this winter. Because she doesn't want to get rid of anything and the place is dangerously cluttered and I'm afraid of ending up like her.

One piece of advice that turns up a lot about decluttering is that you should get the stuff out the door after deciding to get rid of it. Don't keep it around for ages and second-guess yourself. But now (thinking about stuff other than little plastic measuring cups) the thrift stores are closed. There's just the box of "I should get rid of it when conditions permit" cluttering up the living room until I tidy up and reshelve the books...

[anne]

I have five shopping bags full. It's awful. But I took a couple of tees out and I'm cutting them in strips for mask ties, so I guess it's not all bad.

[mrissa]

The thrift store is an excellent plan, because you're not wasting the thing, you're sharing the thing, and that can be much easier to deal with.

[anne]

In my case, it's a very old habit, because my church runs the biggest one in my home town. (The First Methodists do the estate sales.)

We won't go into how I found stuff at Parenthome that I know perfectly well I told my mom to donate. It got there eventually, that's what counts, and now it's even vintage as opposed to just old!

[adrian_turtle]

I was with my mother for 4 days. I got one item off the premises. Well, two. She made matching dresses for a little girl and a doll, back in 1973. I managed to send them both to Virginia, along with some packing material. Why put bubble-wrap around cloth? To get the bubble-wrap, at least that piece of bubble wrap, out of the house.

[anne]

❤️ it's so hard!

[adrian_turtle]

I'm not sure it's easier for me to deal with. Maybe "differently hard," because it brings up all the logistics questions about how to get the stuff to the thrift store. It's been a long time since I decided I didn't need all those nice dishes that were given to me as wedding presents. What's hard is figuring out if there's any point selling them on ebay (but how to ship them?) or if I'm going to give them to the thrift store how can I get them there? Obviously none of this is happening this spring, but even when thrift stores are open and the city isn't in quarantine, the thrift store is 2 buses away and I can't lift much. "Deal with the damn dishes" was one of the things I was going to do when I had some time. And of course I can't...they just sort of go back and forth between the cabinet and the box on the dining room floor.

[anne]

I have a car and two functional, if weak, arms. If the dishes are in smallish boxes I can lift them.

[adrian_turtle]

I may take you up on that someday, when quarantine is fully over. They're really nice dishes, and I see them being listed on ebay for non-trivial amounts of money. $50 for a place setting...but that's including shipping, and it's such a pain to pack what with the teacups, and is that the list price or do people actually pay it? And is anybody ever going to have fancy dinner parties again?

[anne]

Craigslist? Idk. You have some time to think about it, I guess. :-/

[pameladean]

I have similar issues, most markedly with measuring spoons. If it is affordable, what I ended up doing was getting two sets of new spoons, or however many it took, before tossing the old ones. Even then it was hard. What if all the new ones had been used up and we were behind on the dishes? The horror. But to some level of the brain, it really is a horror.

P.

[adrian_turtle]

I'm ok with spoons! It's very strange, because they have become the standard figure of speech for invisible disabilities. (I heard some people even put a spoon on the Seder plate, to symbolically include people with disabilities. This sounded wrong to me at first, but I can't imagine what else you could use that would fit.)

I am fortunate to have a large set of matching flatware, that includes 18 iced-tea spoons. Each one holds an actual teaspoon, but unlike a measuring-spoon teaspoon it's narrow enough to fit into the top of a spice jar. It took me surprisingly little practice to learn how to measure out a half-teaspoon or quarter-teaspoon of salt with them. But if I didn't have those I'm sure I'd fret about measuring spoons as well because the plastic ones are such a pain to keep track of and wash.

[pameladean]

I use grapefruit spoons for getting spices out of the narrower jars. Mine hold about half a teaspoon, and I don't use them if precision is required; i.e., in baking.

I can't think of anything better than a spoon either. A plastic straw? The spoon is probably better than that. Not everybody really cottons to the analogy, is the problem, but I wonder if that was once true for other items on the plate as well.

P.

[silveradept]

If the things are difficult to use, and you have a pair that is easier than that to use, it's okay to get rid of the difficult ones.

[adrian_turtle]

Thank you. Every bit of encouragement helps.

[anne]

It's hard! And I don't know how it works for you, but at Parenthome I could only manage about three hours per day of active deciding. The rest of the time I was just mindlessly cleaning, or scrolling through Twitter, or staring at the wall. Now that I'm home... some days I can accomplish a lot, and some days I can throw away one grocery receipt that fell behind the recycling bin. But that's one less receipt to toss tomorrow! Entropy is reduced!