The Fitz-n-one-car project

Goal: To limit the number of possessions that I own such that all non-furniture items belonging to Heather and I fit inside of my car.

Not really sure where I came up with this, other than it seemed like a nice, lofty ideal for simplifying the things I own. My guess is that over the last 3 nights, I’ve removed roughly 30 cubic feet of crap from our clutches, with more on the way. I do recall that at the end of my Junior year of college, every single thing I owned fit inside of my Camry. The goal, out of necessity (I had to drive back to the motherland), was accomplished then.

Since then, what has happened:

- Moved in to a larger space (much larger than college), not fully furnished as my college apt was. This caused the natural progression to obtain at least basic furniture, which began with a mattress and box springs. Entertainingly, this purchase did not occur until some 4 to 5 months after I left college. I was content to sleep on an air mattress, the ultimate in comfort and portability. From there, the majority of furniture was provided graciously by Abbas and Heather’s dad and his wife. The house we rent came furnished with a stove, microwave, fridge, and washer/drier.

- Got married. This was a biggie. You’d think two people could split one set of things (media, dishes, whatnot) to live on and that would be that. My wife, bless her awesome little heart, is what we call the supreme overlord of all things packrat. If she can see a conceivable
use for it 5, 10, 15 years from now, that is plenty of a reason to box it up and let it sit. About once a year, we enter in to the realm of all-things-boxed-up and slowly thin out the massive amount of unused items. It’s a slow process, but when you do it once a year, you eventually start remembering what stuff you didn’t throw away last year, and how you hadn’t used it all of the past year, or the year prior… and so it wasn’t real likely you’d need them in the coming year either.

Btw, if you’re one of the uber-kind people who has helped Heather and I move, my bad for not doing things like the purge this week before we moved. I haven’t used 95% of the items being removed since then. Little extra moving karma in yo’ pocket.

FL: French dood reaches level 70 in Warcraft in 28 hours. – this, to most of you, won’t seem like that big of a deal. To give you a point of reference, the developer of the game has thought it would take a few months, or at least weeks, to accomplish this.