Back in September last year I decided to join Taph on her Seven Things Spring challenge for one month. Six months later I'm finally putting the challenge aside. It's going to be weird not obsessively counting stuff each week after six months but I suspect the habits I've picked up will remain with me long after the official challenge is over.
There have been weeks where it's been easy to meet my figures. Weeks where the last thing I've wanted to do (or had time to do) has been finding stuff to cull. And then there are the times where I've gone to deal with a pile of stuff and realised it's not the right time. And that's one of the things I've really appreciated about Seven Things - because I'm the one making the decision about what's going each week I've not had the pressure to cull stuff which I'm not quite ready to get rid of. And instead of feeling like a failure I simply move on to find something else whose time has come.
Sometimes the hardest thing has been dealing with unexpected gifts from friends - although very welcome I did have to approach, with a sense of humour, the "problem" of having friends who are "too" generous just when I think I have my figures for the week sorted!
Without any further ado, here are this week's figures:
In:
* Gift from Taph: another pair cream knitting needles, 3 more balls wool for the Koolhaas wristwarmers.
Total In this week: 7
Out:
* My favorite black and white spotty bra which has started trying to stab me in the chest while I'm wearing it: bin
* Angel swap for one of the participants in my Swap-Bot January Black & White Swap: 16 items
* 6 black and white scarves (I don't wear scarves so, pretty as they are, it's silly keeping them), 2 headbands (I had 4. I only have one head. I only use headbands to keep back my hair when I very occasionally use a face pack. I really should have got rid of 3 but I gave myself a break), 1 white sunhat which makes me feel like a cricket umpire when I wear it (and not in a good way): op shop
* 6 broken bits of dolls house furniture which I'm never going to bother mending, even if I could: bin
Total Out this week: 32
Total Out this week: 32
Shake-it-all-about:
* Socks
Net items out so far during Seven Things Spring/ Summer: 366.5
(which means I averaged nett 2 items out per day over the six month period!)
I ran some other figures and discovered this rather interesting (I think) statistic:
Items In Sept 2007 - Feb 2008:
Which makes me happy for so many reasons...
You are so good... and off to New Zealand this week hey!
ReplyDeleteYeah - I have been slack for a couple of weeks ... kinda been away, and then just plain slack... or didn't want to admit the goodies I brought back from Conference.
Safe travelling
Janet McK
It's been a blast having you along for the ride - not always easy but great to be able to talk about it with someone who understands.
ReplyDeleteI'm betting if you break those stats down further that a lot of the "new" items were transient stuff like magazines which you pass on really quickly rather than maintain.
I'd not actually thought of that! Turns out just over 1/3 of the "New" spend was magazines.
ReplyDeleteBecause I stopped keeping track of which titles I received each week I can't break down that statistic into the ones I kept and ones I passed on but at a guess I'd say half of them were read and sent Out again (ie: 17% of total New spend didn't stay for more than a month).