So, it's now late February - I figured it was time to update my Shoebox for the month (if you're just joining us, this is the original post).
I was hoping to find some winter outer gear (hat, gloves, scarf, etc) on sale, but didn't locate anything. So, I went with a "spa" idea instead (who doesn't dream about going to the spa in dreary February - or maybe I'm projecting?). So - a nice mani-pedi kit in a re-sealable sleeve with nail brush, foot file, emery board, etc. On sale for $5.99.
I also received a bonus item this month - my friend, Elisa, received one of those cool, fold-away reusable totes from LUG in a conference swag bag. She has others, so she gave this one to me. Since it is unused and even still has the tags on, I'm adding it to my box. These fold-away totes are so handy - Rosemary and I each carry one (a different brand) in our purse or backpack - nice to have when you stop by a store or shop unexpectedly and don't want to carry home a couple of pounds of salmon in your hands :)
I have hoarder tendencies. If there were a Kinsey Scale of clutter (from zen minimalist to star of A&E's Extreme Hoarders), I would be just right of centre. Not quite all the way to crazy cat lady, but certainly someone who has to work to keep her table top clean and whose bookshelf could use a good thinning.
I like to collect things. Not ALL things, but specific categories of things. Because the end game to the collecting is sorting. (So, I actually like to SORT things.) And to sort, you have to have things .. hence the collecting. I blame Herman Hesse for my collecting. Hesse wrote The Glass Bead Game which I read as a young person. Well, tried to read - I checked it out of the library and got a few dozen pages into it. It was largely beyond my ability at the time and I missed most of the point of the book, but it didn't stop me from fantasizing about what the titular game would look and play like … a synthesis of human learning along different themes, drawing from examples of art, music, literature, philosophical thought, science theories, etc.
All represented by beads.
I imagined a complex, multi-dimensional abacus of filaments and beads. I even convinced my father to help me build such a device. It ended up being much less complex than my imagination (more like a multi-string, 2 dimensional abacus rather than a multi-dimensional one), but still a device that I delighted in stringing and restringing with various patterns of beads. I wish I had pictures of this device and its various incarnations. But, alas, I grew up in a time when we didn't document every waking moment. But my bead collection was prodigious.
Though the years, these hoarder inclinations have taken various forms. The worst was when I filled up a basement with old computer parts I was going to turn into art. Absolute nightmare. Currently, I have way too many envelopes of chiyogami paper. I find some of these papers so beautiful, it almost makes me ache to look at them. I've been actively trying to resist hoarding these papers, trying to find projects in which to use them. I used a few on the Christmas cards I made this year.
When I get in this hoarding mode, I remind myself of something I read in Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project. In her chapter on money and its relation to happiness, Rubin discusses about the idea of "spending out" …
A few years ago, my sister gave me a box of beautiful stationery for my birthday. I loved it, but I'd never used it. When I was mailing some photos to the grandparents, I hesitated to use the new stationery because I was "saving" it; but to what better use could it be put? Of course I should use those notes. Spend out.
Rubin further expands "spending out" to our generosity with time and ideas. And in all things "trusting abundance". (This whole chapter on happiness and money is excellent - I really love the entire book, but she really crystallizes some ideas for me around money and material things). I try to remember to spend out .. with my chiyogami paper and other ways … by remembering to use the good china, drink the good wine, eat the gourmet chocolate, write with the good pen. Rubin quotes one of her blog readers who commented on a post about spending out "Life is too short to save your good china or your good lingerie or your good ANYTHING for later because truly, later may never come."
I've been thinking even more about spending out because I am reading Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century: 32 Families Open Their Doors - a fascinating book that documents the key findings of a social science research project by researchers at the Center on Everyday Lives of Families (CELF): tracking the daily lives (through interviews, photographs, videos, and other ethnographic methods) of 32 families in Southern California. All of the families in this book have a clutter problem .. in varying degrees. But it seems 95% of North Americans have a clutter problem. Too much stuff. We see this in the rise of personal organizers and decluttering experts (my personal favourite, Peter Walsh from the old TLC Clean Sweep show - he's still helping people get organized - he did a FANTASTIC declutter project called #31days2getorganized on social media in January). And in the abundance of aspirational magazines like Real Simple.
We have many mechanisms by which we accumulate possessions in our home, but we have few rituals or mechanisms or processes for unloading these objects, for getting rid of them.
As a former ritual theory major, I find this comment quite telling (it's at about 3:20 in the video - the whole 6:30 are fascinating and worth watching - actually ALL the videos in this series (3) are worth watching). One of the participants in the study appears in the video right after Graesch and describes how things come in: birthdays, holidays, relatives, school and found "treasures". But Graesch's point is well made .. we don't have well-defined occasions or processes for letting go and getting rid of things. On Clean Sweep, fully half (if not more) of Walsh's time was spent as therapist - helping people understand that objects were not the same as people - and as priest - giving people ritual (sometimes a brutal process and sometimes a game) that helped people sort and purge. The #31days2getorganized challenge I mentioned above is a further testament to his ability as ritual tender.
Another welcome entry into this area is the new holiday of Discardia - created by Dinah Sanders 10 years ago as a reminder to let go of what (stuff, habits, ideas) wasn't making her life awesome. Sanders also wrote Discardia: More Life, Less Stuff which contains three key principles and numerous practical tips to celebrate this new holiday and address specific issues, carve away the nonsense of physical objects, habits, or emotional baggage, and uncover what brings you joy. Discardia happens four times a year; Sanders keeps celebrants on track via Facebook and Twitter. Sanders' ebook version of Discardia is only $2.99 - totally worth it!
Aside from my spending out struggles, I do try to find my own ways to declutter. Both Rosemary and I try to do a bi-annual (winter and summer) clothes review. We've held two book swaps over the last year and plan to do another one in the spring (maybe not 100% oriented towards clutter reduction, but at least clutter rotation :). And I'm hoping to create a Little Free Library this spring as well which may help a bit more with book sharing as well.
And, of course, finding ways to use my chiyogami scraps.
I often wish I had chosen "science" as a career … but I decided to be a "liberal arts" major. But these days, particularly with the advent of the Internet, I can be a Citizen Scientist. Back before "crowd-sourcing" meant "begging for money on Indiegogo", I participated in SETI@Home - a Citizen Science project where you could offer your computer's spare cycles for crunching radio telescope data and searching for patterns in the noise.
Though apparently projects like SETI@Home aren't considered TRUE Citizen Science anymore; they now bear the moniker Passive Citizen Science or simply "distributed computing". I don't know that I agree with that - so many of these projects (this is a list of some that use the BOINC software in addition to SETI@Home - projects ranging astronomy to biology to mathematics to humanitarian research) are an easy first step to getting excited about observing, collecting, recording and analyzing data about the world around us.
Citizen Science as a phenomenon didn't begin with the Internet. Starting in the Renaissance, independent scientists (aka gentleman scientists .. argh!!) appeared here and there .. often hanging about the Royal Society of London and making interesting discoveries outside of academic institutions. Charles Darwin and Ben Franklin are good examples of early citizen scientists; Craig Venter and Susan Blackmore are good modern-day examples.
One of the Citizen Science projects I participate in has its origins in an event that occurred over a century ago. Apparently, a cool thing to do back in the 19th century was go out and kill as many birds as you could on Christmas Day. Ahh .. those crazy kids. But then Frank Chapman, an officer in the newly formed Audubon Society thought "Hmm .. maybe there is a better way to celebrate the Baby Jesus than by killing a bunch of birds". So Chapman proposed that people just count and record the birds. And in 1900, the first Christmas Bird Count was held.
The Christmas Bird Count (Canadian link) continues to this day all across North America. The 113th count closed on January 5, 2013 - all the results have not been compiled yet but last year there were 2,248 counts (Canada: 410; US: 1739; Latin America & Caribbean: 99) with 63,227 citizen scientists participating. A related project that do is Project Feeder Watch: a winter long survey of birds that visit feeders in backyards and community areas across North America. It's operated by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Bird Studies Canada. I used to participate it in when I lived in Toronto and had a back yard. Now that we're in a place with a yard in Vancouver, I set up a couple of feeders and have started to count again. The above picture is of one of my visitors last spring, a house finch.
But if bird watching isn't your gig, there's Citizen Science options for everyone. One I recently discovered: RinkWatch - where backyard skating meets environmental science. Following a report from scientists in Montreal that there will be fewer outdoor skating days in the future, a group of geographers from Wilfrid Laurier University created RinkWatch to track changes in the climate. From the website …
We want outdoor rink lovers across North America and anywhere else in the world to tell us about their rinks. We want you to pin the location of your rink on our map, and then each winter record every day that you are able to skate on it. Think of it as your rink diary. We will gather up all the information from all the backyard rinks and use it to track the changes in our climate.
You may not think of it as science, but that’s exactly what you will be doing – making regular, systematic observations about environmental change in your own back yard. You will be joining a growing league of citizen-scientists from across North America. Is the backyard skating rink an endangered species? The first step in finding out for sure is to gather the statistics. If we want skate outside in the future, we have to find what’s going on today. So please, join RinkWatch, and help prevent backyard rinklessness.
Awesome, eh?
If you (and your kids!) want to participate in a Citizen Science project, Scientific American maintains a portal of projects - from identifying animals on the Serengeti snapped by dozens of field cameras to being a Bat Detective. And if you want to get out and about in your community and do Citizen Science on the move, mobile apps are a rapidly growing area of Citizen Science. OpenScientist.org has a list of mobile projects.
One of my favourite is ProjectNoah - actually not a citizen science project in and of itself, but a tool for citizen scientists to store information on any animals they spot and make that data available to researchers regardless of the project. On the ProjectNoah site there are several "missions" that are taking place based on the ongoing database of information that is coming in. I also like ProjectNoah because they award badges for completing missions. And I loves me some gamification :)
So, what do you think? Ready to don your lab coat?
Hi, my name is Kate Trgovac. I write about social media, interactive marketing, technology, design and some other miscellany. If you're looking for Kate Leroux, you'll find her at the .com :)
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