Still here

It might look as if I've let this blog go dormant, but that's only temporary. It's been a crazy time around here, and some things are bound to get neglected.

We're still down-sizing our household for our anticipated move to an empty nest in Santa Cruz, CA. We've gotten rid of tons of stuff, and still have one shipment of furniture/furnishings going to a consignment store after someone buys our house.

The house has been on the market three weeks now. No buyer yet, but lots of lookers. Fingers crossed.

Amongst all this household tumult, I finished my latest work-in-progress, a crime novel called 'The Big Wink,' and sent it off to my agent. Now I'm learning about Kindle, etc., so I can make my backlist available for e-readers.

I'm still posting my "Rules for Successful Living" at least once a day on Facebook, so if we're not friends there yet, get on board.

More soon.

Clutter, clutter everywhere

After finishing some projects, I was tidying up today, unearthing my desk. I found birthday cards from three years ago. Earlier, I bustled around, putting away stuff all over the house and garage. It's been that kind of a day. Reminds me of a column I wrote called "Stuff It."

You can read it here.

What your home office needs

We spend a big chunk of our lives working, so it’s no wonder we pay so much attention to decorating and equipping our workspaces.

Visit any cubicle in America, and you’ll find all sorts of gizmos and gimcracks and souvenir snowglobes and clipped cartoons aimed at giving the place some personality. We want to claim the space, make it our own, and if that means thumb-tacking “Garfield” to the walls, then so be it. (Not the cartoons. I mean the actual cat. But that’s just me.)

Manufacturers and merchants have recognized this drive to personalize our office spaces and have responded with tons of products aimed as separating us from the hard-earned dollars we make in those cubicles. The products get more outlandish and high-tech all the time.

A website called Switched.com recently collected some of the latest in a list called “10 Ultimate Cubicle Gadgets.” It’s a wacky list, ranging from a handheld air-conditioner to a high-tech cubicle makeover that costs more than $10,000.

Some items appeal to the inner nerd: a palm-sized polygraph, a device that signals when the worker is displaying poor desk posture, a fingerprint reader for password protection, and a washable, flexible computer keyboard.

Other items included a fancy lamp, a mini-fridge that holds one can of soda, and a round video phone that sits on squat legs, looking very much like the upraised back end of a dog.

These products look like a lot of fun, and I’m sure your cubicle would be a better place if you installed them. But the collection doesn’t address the millions of people who work in home offices, where the needs are more basic and there’s no boss to say what’s inappropriate.

Here are some gadgets you need in your home office:

--A thermal mug, which will reduce the number of times you must run to the kitchen for more coffee. A mug with a lid can prevent expensive spills into the computer.

--A set of screwdrivers. For making adjustments to your ancient swivel chair, repairing your eyeglasses or opening up your computer tower, so you can do some real damage to what’s inside.

--Duct tape has a thousand uses, including emergency hair removal and securing the occasional splint.

--Nail clippers. With no co-workers around, you can do your personal grooming right at your desk. Avoid letting the flying shards land in your keyboard.

--A lobster bib. We work-at-home types tend to eat at our desks.

--A threadbare bathrobe, for pulling on in a hurry when the FedEx driver rings the doorbell.

--A yo-yo, paddle-ball or other time-wasting toy. Because nobody’s watching.

--Earplugs, for those times when children are in the house.

--Solitaire, Tetris or other computer games. Everybody needs to take a break occasionally, right? Even if those “breaks” last for hours . . .

--A calendar and/or to-do list. You need organization and goal-setting in a home office. Otherwise, you waste all day watching old episodes of “The Munsters.”

--A box of tissues. Using your sleeve is gross, even if no one’s watching.

--Notepads, for doodling.

--A music delivery system of some sort, in case you feel like dancing.

--A sharp knife for opening packages. Also handy for slitting your wrists when you realize you’ve missed yet another deadline.

Finally, the most important device of all. Your home office needs a door so can shut out your family and the rest of the world.

You don’t want them to see you clipping your toenails.

Conquering a mountain of stuff

Somewhere in your home -- spare bedroom, attic, basement, garage -- lives the Repository of Stuff We Don’t Use Anymore.

It’s a mystical place of letter sweaters and souvenir ashtrays, baby clothes and broken crockery, Magic Eight Balls and eight-track tapes, outgrown toys and outmoded phones and old jeans that’ll fit again after we drop 20 pounds (yeah, right).

Once in a blue moon, someone in your household will feel compelled to clean out this accumulated detritus. We could make better use of that space, the thinking goes, and we’ll never, ever need this stuff again. Why not get rid of it?

This is an admirable ambition, but, as with so many things, it’s easier said than done. Parting with your old stuff is a hard, dirty job that requires elbow grease and grit and resolve. Not to mention backache medication and frequent hot showers and, quite possibly, an expensive divorce.

At our house, the Repository of Unused Stuff was in our three-car garage. I don’t want to say how much dusty stuff we had piled up, but there was barely room for two vehicles. You do the math.

This heap of random stuff didn’t bother me. Sure, we’d moved it all a couple of times. Sure, some of the boxes weren’t even labeled. But I figured, as long as I could get my minivan door open and squeeze inside, everything was fine. The stuff wasn’t hurting anything. We’d sort it out eventually. Maybe a small fire would solve the problem for us …

My wife had other ideas. The stacks of sacks and boxes and assorted belongings bugged her. She’d put up with this stuff for years, and it was high time we did something about it.
Of course, she’s got no time herself. She’s busy having a career. So it fell to me to tackle the garage. She urged me to leap into action, in a sort of X-Treme Spring-Cleaning Challenge, and conquer Mt. Stuff with speed and muscle and brainpower.

I’m not a leap-into-action sort of guy. I’m more of a sit-and-ponder-and-sigh type. When I do finally take action, it’s almost imperceptible.

I oozed out into the garage and started opening boxes and sorting through sacks. I hauled off stuff. I threw some away. I gave a lot to charity. Gradually, the mound of stuff grew smaller.

The goal was to make that third garage useable. Our older son has a car now, and if we could lose enough stuff, he could park indoors. Not that he’s ever home. Not that we care if his filthy car sits out in the weather. But you’ve got to set goals to take on a job like this.

After I got rid of a lot of stuff, I ran into a true dilemma. What remained -- extra furniture, an old microwave, a portable TV -- would be perfect for a dorm room or a first apartment. If I kept it, with an eye toward my son moving out soon, then he couldn’t park in the garage. If I got rid of it, he’d have another excuse to never leave home.

So I took all that stuff and put it in his car.

Kidding! It wouldn’t fit in his car. And he wouldn’t take the hint anyway.

No, I’m still stacking and sorting and throwing stuff out. Slowly making progress. Someday, I’ll be finished. That old stuff will be out of our lives, once and for all.

Then it’ll be time to get some new stuff.

(Editor's note: After this column appeared, I found a way to stack all the future apartment furniture around the walls so our son could park in the garage. It's still there. He still hasn't moved out. Maybe I could just furnish the garage and he could live out there. . .)

Keep it simple, stupid

Simplicity's all the rage these days, and many lifestyle gurus urge us to simplify our lives.

We’re told we should get more exercise by walking everywhere like our simple ancestors, the hunters and gatherers. We're told we should maintain the diet of simple Mediterranean goatherds. We're told we should embrace the simplistic, old-fashioned values of South Dakotans and other primitive peoples.

Mostly, we're advised to own less stuff. All our swanky possessions and elaborate electronic gizmos drag us down, the gurus say, leading us to want more, more, more of everything, while denying us the spiritual fulfillment that comes from leading a simple life.

The experts pass along this advice in books and articles in which they try to encapsulate simplicity in catchy ways that make it appear desirable. For these efforts, they are rewarded with tons of money, which they then use to buy more stuff.

In an attempt to tear off a piece of that action, I've come up with the perfect motto for the simple life: Live every day as if you're about to go through airport security.

What better way, in our helter-skelter world, to sum up simplicity? Is there any time when we're more embarrassed and inconvenienced by our possessions? When glowering, latex-gloved security guards fondle us all over, don't we regret that Rolex? Don't we wish we'd left our rodeo belt buckle at home?

At airport security, we're stripped down to nothing but clothes and sock-feet. As our inconvenient stuff goes through the X-ray machine, aren't we given the perfect moment to examine modern life and its complexity?

Ask yourself: Why do I go around with my pockets full and my briefcase bulging and my personal digital assistant surgically grafted to my hand? Why can I not live, even for a few hours, without e-mail or a cell phone? Why do I need so danged many keys?

Use the Airport Security Simplicity model to get back to basics. Limit jewelry and the stuff you carry in your pockets to items that will fit in that little plastic cereal bowl they give you at airport security. Briefcases and other life baggage should be limited to two carry-ons -- one that would fit in an overhead bin and a personal item such as a purse or laptop computer.

(You might want to eliminate shoes altogether. Why hassle with them? Flip-flops, baby, flip-flops.)

I reached this epiphany only recently, when I realized that I'd simplified my life to the point where I can prance right through airport metal detectors. Because I work at home, I've eliminated from my repertoire most of the stuff that regular folks carry around. In my pockets, I'm down to two keys, a wallet and a comb. My wristwatch, with its leather band and fake gold case, doesn't set off alarms. Neither do the cheap plastic ballpoints I favor.

You can't get much more simple than I am. Wait, what I mean to say is: Your life can't get much simpler than mine. I've streamlined and jettisoned and simplified to the point where I go out into the world (or at least into airports) all but naked of material things. Guys entering prison carry more stuff than I do.

This should qualify me as a lifestyle guru, one who has fully embraced the simplicity trend. I plan to sit back now and wait for the riches to come my way.

Then I'm going shopping. I need some stuff.

Garage sale shuffle

'Tis the season of garage sales, as millions of Americans try to unload their accumulated stuff on the unsuspecting public.

It's the Great Black Market of summer, the annual redistribution of wealth. People out in their yards in lawn chairs, marking down their worldly possessions.

We've all got too much stuff, piling up everywhere and thwarting every attempt to park in our own garages. So we sell off some of it, thin the herd, streamline things around the house.
And, before you know it, the house is jam-packed again, and it's time for another garage sale.

Why does this keep happening? Because we're buying stuff from our neighbors' garage sales, stuff they in turn got from garage sales years ago. The stuff goes round and round, and you end up buying a Salad Shooter that's just like the one you used to have . . .

There's a whole food chain of kitchen gizmos and baby furniture and bowling trophies circulating untaxed through the economy. Some items -- and I'm thinking here of ceramic panthers -- have moved from house to house for generations.

Next time you have a garage sale, do a quick inventory. Half the stuff you're selling probably came from flea markets and other people's garage sales. Stuff you never should've bought in the first place. Stuff people were GETTING RID OF.

(Thirty percent of the stuff you're selling will be things you bought "on sale," even though you didn't need them. The rest will be wedding gifts that you'll never unload.)

Getting rid of it all becomes more complicated once you have children. Kids never want to get rid of anything, ever. Broken toys, commemorative T-shirts, filthy sneakers, rocks, bones, lumps of dirt -- all these things have great sentimental value to children.

This detritus accumulates around the house, filling our lives with sentimentality and whimsy and punctured bare feet. We parents can never throw any of it away because of Murphy's Law of Parenting: The item you throw out will be the one the child really, really needs to finish the big school project on deadline.

This law applies to all homework papers. No matter how much the parent may try to parse out a date or a grade or some other signal that each stray rumpled page is no longer current, he or she will make the occasional mistake and throw out the child's important homework. Or, worse, some other child's important homework. And the parent will never hear the end of it. So school papers amass around the house like bales of cotton on a riverboat dock.

Same goes for any plastic "action figure" or balsa-wood airplane. Throw it out, and it's the one the child was using to prove Important Facts About Gravity in the science fair.

Any teddy bear or toy the parent tries to discard will immediately become the child's favorite one. How could you possibly get rid of that broken Shrek we got for free at some burger joint? The child LOVES that toy and is now emotionally bereft and will require expensive therapy.

When spring cleaning comes around, parents are forced to engage in stealth operations to get rid of their children's stuff. We ship bales of old homework off to the dump when the kids aren't looking. We creep around in the middle of the night, stuffing toys into black trash bags, hiding the evidence. On the day of the garage sale, we ship the kids off to Grandma's to keep them from scaring off customers with crying fits in the driveway.

We roll out the bazaar of baby clothes and broken burger toys and ceramic panthers and important homework, and a few customers trickle by and haul off some of the stuff. American commerce carries on.

Unfortunately, most of the inventory doesn't move. All the unsold stuff must return to the "warehouse," otherwise known as the space in the garage where the car should live.

So what if we must park on the street? At least we've thinned the inventory. We've cleaned out closets and raked toys out from under beds. Our lives are organized and ready for summer.

Just in time for the flea markets.

Stuff it

If you want your home to have that much-sought-after "lived-in look," then I suggest you get some more stuff.

That's right. Stuff. Junk. Possessions. Run right out and buy some. Position it carefully on shelves or in boxes or behind furniture. Dust it regularly. Take it out once a year and wonder what the heck you were thinking when you bought it. Then put it back. Dust some more.

You want your house to feel like a home? Then you need lots of dusty stuff sitting around. Toys and books and breadmakers and souvenirs and old posters and photo albums and that vinyl record collection you never listen to. Gizmos and gimcracks and geegaws galore.

Stuff, glorious stuff, accumulates as you age. When I was a bachelor, I could fit all my worldly possessions into a small foreign car. The last time my family moved, we filled an entire moving van with our stuff. When the moving guy got a look at the number of heavy boxes of books we'd packed, I thought he'd weep.

Our last house was half the size of this one. We had so much stuff, we'd reached capacity. Every time we bought something, we had to get rid of something else. There simply wasn't room for one more thing. At our new, bigger house, I felt like I could breathe again, like I had some elbow room. Two years later, we're full up.

It's not that we're such acquisitive people. We don't make an effort to buy things we don't need. But needs change. Something that seemed essential at the mall becomes so much unused stuff when you get it home. Catalogs come unbidden in the mail. Kids demand new toys. Friends and relatives give gifts we can never throw out. The stuff piles up.

Frugality results in stuff being kept forever. You might, one day, find a use for that stuff. You might need it, and wouldn't you feel stupid if you had to go out and buy another one? Sure, it's broken, but you might fix it someday. Sure, those jeans don't fit anymore, but if you ever drop that extra 10 pounds (ha, ha!), you'll be glad you hung onto them.

And the stuff mounts up until teetering stacks cover every horizontal surface. You hide it in corners and in closets, but you always know it's there, threatening to topple over and crush innocent bystanders.

Somewhere along the way, your stuff becomes a burden. It moves into a new category -- "clutter" -- and it slowly drives you crazy.

You can give it away. Charities want your stuff. (Well, some of it anyway. You can probably just discard those salt-and-pepper shakers shaped like kittens.) Friends and relatives sometimes want your stuff. If you can persuade them to take your stuff off your hands, they might even give it back once you finally find a use for it. Or, at least, you can go visit it.

You can sell it. This is why every neighborhood has someone throwing a garage sale every weekend. They want to get rid of their stuff and recoup some of its original cost in the process. I wonder about the people who frequent garage sales. They arise early on weekends to be the first to arrive at other's houses and swoop down on all their valuable stuff. I'm sure there are bargains to be had there. But aren't you just moving stuff that somebody no longer wants into your house, where it will eventually become your own unwanted stuff? And then you're forced to have a garage sale to unload it on some other poor suckers. And the cycle continues, stuff moving from house to house, accumulating dust and nicks and scratches until even the most ardent devotee of used stuff recognizes it for the trash it is and throws it out.

Perhaps that is the ultimate solution. If, as a red-blooded American consumer, you feel you simply must buy more stuff, go ahead and purchase it. Then stop by the dump on the way home and throw it out. You'll save all those storage steps. And a lot of dusting.