Overflow

An editorial note: All of the future-geeky stuff I’ve been putting here will now start going over to the blog called Futurescan, a group effort of the folks associated with the UHCL futures studies progam.

This will leave Overflow to just be my own personal repository for thoughts, work and other things that catch my fancy.

This is an interesting article on the nature of housekeeping and homemaking, highlighting the growing industry surrounding “clutter control” and “simplicity”.

I agree wholeheartedly with the author’s observation that the bulk of the so-called “simplicity” movement (a la glossy mags like Real Simple) is just a veiled marketing effort to get us to spend money to satisfy our unrequited yearning for a simple life. Read this article and then go do some real housekeeping. To simplify, you actually have to toss stuff, not buy more stuff…

In fact, we’re having a garage sale tomorrow, trying to get rid of the effluvia and detritus left after merging two households into one home. (We only need one lawnmower, one edger, and no more than, say, three hammers.)

Last Saturday was spent cleaning up the garage in the new house, going through boxes of my in-laws’ life and determining what to keep, sell, or throw away. Whoever packed the boxes made the task as difficult as possible with every box having a mix of trash, broken items, duplicate housewares, and priceless antiques and irreplaceable memorabilia. What’s more, some of the broken items were irreplaceable antiques awaiting repair. It was excruciating, but Heidi and I finally got through it. The garage has now joined the rest of the new house in being a Useful Living Space instead of being just a repository of stuff.

I can see a darn fine workshop emerging — my inlaws have a spectacular collection of tools leftover from a lifetime of contracting — and it’s starting to spark my creative juices. I just have to get past this garage sale and the sale of my old home.

Heh, at this garage sale, the garage will actually be for sale. Wanna buy a tiny but well-loved three bedroom house in Houston?