Tossing Stuff

Is it just me?
I don't like waste.

When I was growing up, we always ALWAYS had too much month at the end of the money.

It's hard to save up when every dime is spent before you even get your paycheck, ya know?

And if you don't know, consider yourself fortunate.

So my mom wasn't a smart shopper anyway. Lots of stories about that. Every time I think about all that kinda stuff I get aggravated. I have issues from the years I spent wearing two pairs of pants and two shirts that had to be washed all the time. Ugh.

And the little town where we lived had ONE grocery store. It was then (and still is) overpriced. Their excuse was 'the shipping charges' but after spending about 12 years in the shipping/warehousing/inventory control business, I can tell you that's not really accurate. They're price-gouging assholes, they have a LOT of money and they have been ripping off the population of Grant County, Oregon for one hell of a long time.

The people who own that store are big people in the town hierarchy, so they've been able to vote against any competition. About 12 years ago, Safeway was exploring the idea of opening a store there, but the store owner's position/influence on the town council stopped that from happening.

So groceries are ridiculously priced now and they were then, too.

Mom always bought the smallest shampoo, laundry soap, toilet paper, paper towels. You get the idea. We ran out of things all the time.

She saved margarine containers and foil and all our old sheets and towels for rags. We wore our socks until they were rags, too. There were tons of little thrifty things we did.

She came to visit me once when Eric and I lived in Southern California. We didn't have kids yet, and both of us were working. When I went to the store, I bought BIG packages of stuff. The 'large economy' size according to the labels.

She went to the store with me while I did the week's shopping and was quite concerned about it.

"Why are you buying the large size? There are only two of you!"

It bothered her a lot. I did the math for her, explaining how it actually saved me money in the long run, but it was so weird to her after her decades of buying things like sample sizes that it left her feeling very odd. I know I wasn't able to convince her.

Ah well.

But some of that cheapskate behavior rubbed off on me. I used to save the small remnants of foil from the end of the roll in case I needed a small piece for something, like the end of a chicken drumstick or to divide up a pan with two different kinds of stuff in it. If there was a little bit of the silver polish left in the bottom of the tub, and it was crusty and dried out, I still kept it in case I needed to polish a bracelet I hadn't worn for months or my grandma's clip on earrings, the only pair I wear.

A tiny bit of window cleaner in the spray bottle but not enough so I'd buy a new bottle or a refill but the other one sometimes didn't get used up and I'd have four under the sink.

My big one was shampoo/conditioner. I buy big pump bottles of it. It stops pumping when there is still a bit left in the bottle, though. So the little bit was stored under the bathroom sink until I got around to getting out the big funnel and turning the bottle over into another bottle.

I figured it out once, it was something like 'buy 12, get one free'.

The amount of time I spent messing with it, wiping up the inevitable spills, making room for another bottle and another bottle until I finally managed to do the emptying, balancing it up on the edge of the sink in the right position and then waiting a couple hours for all of it to empty... well, that amount of time was ridiculous.

I ended up saving a total of about five dollars in a year. Not enough to justify all that work. So this last summer when we did the big cleanup, I finally gave myself permission to throw the shampoo bottles away when they stop pumping.

It was incredibly difficult to do that.

The big purge we did over the summer helped me change my way of looking at things, but it's still hard for me to just... act. To immediately go through the mail. To put things AWAY, not down.

It's time to do some cleaning again. Part of it is Mason and Alyssa. They have little space to call their own, but the overflow is starting to take over the living room. They are going to box some things up and put them in the shed, now that I've taken my boxes of stuff for work out.

I have to get things under control again, it was really nice for the month or so that it lasted.

Do you have clutter issues? Do you hold on to shit you don't need for a long time?

Please tell me I'm not the only one with issues.