Simplification

Things are extremely complicated at the moment in my life - just in general, really. At least that's how I'm feeling. Nothing direly earth shattering. Still have my health (relatively speaking, though it's been a difficult two weeks - pain is a hard thing but it has passed. Literally and figuratively, it seems, since I feel much 'better'). Just 'stuff'. It's the holidays and work and the never ending hustle and bustle which has me putting on the brakes, trying to regroup a bit. I have been saying, for months and months 'just make it to the winter break'. And I'm on the downhill side of that goal and know it's just around the corner. I greet it with much trepidation because a) I know it will be over in the blink of an eye and b) if I don't start feeling more positive about my job when I'm back - if the 'fresh start' and 'new day dawning' doesn't help shift my mind into 'it's OK here, I'm fine', I will be in the same dark, dreary place I've been in for weeks. SO we'll see about that.

Mostly, it gets me thinking again at simplifying - as much as possible. So here is a list of things I'm working on doing to make my life easier. And I admit - my life is great...so these are just 'things' that I hope will help me - not that they will assist anyone else.

First, I'm writing letters to a bunch of magazines and cancelling our subscriptions. Example: I get Gourmet magazine, which as anyone who knows me will tell you is a joke. I ordered it after seeing one recipe in it while waiting for a Dr. appointment - and the 'teaser' offer was only $10 for a full year. What a bargain. But now, I get it every month and it's just another magazine I don't have time to read and don't plan to use any information from anytime soon. And it stares at me, piling up on my desk, and makes me feel guilty for not reading it cover to cover. Same with various financial magazines - Kiplingers, Money, Fortune, etc. I get them all, I read a lot of them - but I don't need all 3. They pretty much 'rotate' the content and one year of one of them would give me the same info. So I'll cancel two of them. I also get Working Mother, which I am, still. But my kids are older and I never found the helpful hints particularly helpful when my kids were small and that remains true today.

I will keep Vanity Fair (a monthly guilty pleasure that I would really miss), Real Simple (it isn't helping but I like reading it) and People. Sadly, I'm not really liking People these days - the stories are too short, leave so many unanswered questions - but I've read every edition of People since it first came out. It was sixty nine cents each week and I couldn't wait to take my allowance to the grocery store weekly to pick up a copy. When they offered subscriptions, I resisted - it was a lot of money to shell out all at once, when finding a dollar and some change weekly seemed do-able. But my mom bought me a subscription one year for Christmas and then made it an annual gift for me and J. (who doesn't read it - but my mom was frugal and it was a lot of $$ from her gift budget so we agreed it would count towards his gift, as well. He never minded), and I've renewed it annually since she's been gone. I don't really even like it anymore - I can read it cover to cover in only a 1/2 hour and I used to be able to read a bit every night, for the full week until another one arrived. But I keep it for sentimental value, really.

Everything else must go. I can't handle the guilt from not reading them...the guilt from all the trees being killed to print them, etc.

I also signed up for catalogchoice.org and am culling out the catalogs I receive as well. It takes some time to set up the preferences and enter the customer numbers, etc. but if it works, I should see a significant decrease in the printed materials coming through the mail. It's pretty bad when you have an entire two sided, two shelves cabinet in your office devoted to catalogs. That's a lot of paper. And keeping up with 'culling out' the older versions and replacing them with the newer 'because you never know when you're going to really need some silly thing you didn't know existed before you saw it in a catalog' takes huge amounts of time - time I don't have and time I want to use for other things. Like sleeping, for example. Or cooking. So hey, maybe I should rethink giving up my subscription to Gourmet Magazine?? I might make 'Haricots Verts with Herb Butter' (November, 2007) or 'Zhug' (December, 2007). You never know. Could happen. Maybe I should reinstate my 'Chefs' catalog, too. Just in case.