You are. You will. You can. You do.

A comment from karen_jk this morning has me thinking again about the analogies between weight loss and decluttering--specifically, can you "hack" your clutter the way John Walker claims you can hack your weight?

( Analogies? )

Back in 1912, when my house was built, Portland was booming, and housing for railroad workers was going up fast and cheap. They dug a hole, set some sturdy timber posts in concrete piers, laid beams across them, and put up walls and a roof.

There was a woodstove. No central heat, no insulation, no double-glazed windows; just a box of wood and glass, hovering about three feet above a depression in the soil, with a thin wooden skirt between that crawlspace and the east wind.

Fast forward a century, and a tiny house in an ungentrified working-class neighborhood is, not surprisingly, hardly improved at all. There are electric space heaters now (of the recalled-for-fire-hazard sort), and some cheap landlord of the past insulated the roof to 70s standards, but the house is still bloody cold in the winter.

Well, that's all about to change. The Clean Energy Works contractors spent the morning here assessing and measuring, and whee! It looks like I'm getting not only big fluffy insulation on all six sides of the cube, but what amounts to an actual heating system, too.

Just think! I'll be able to sit in my living room on a January night, rather than having to go to bed just to keep warm.

It's homeowner geekery at its finest, but I'm really pretty excited.

Until today, I hadn't started my car since February. It's been sitting out on the street in front of my house, gathering cherry-tree detritus and looking sad, while I ride my bike everywhere and test non-car-ownership as a way of life.

Poor car. If my sis hadn't stepped in, it would have sat there till all its value was gone. To me, the deadness of it seemed like an insurmountable obstacle, but she called AAA (on her membership), and they came and poured two gallons of gas into the tank and forced enough juice into the battery to turn the engine over.

Then she went with me for an otherwise-pointless 45-minute freeway drive to solidify the battery's charge and ream out whatever pipelines might have become gummed up.

To my amazement, it was fun. Driving fast on a summer afternoon, going nowhere, enjoying the freedom--it's part of the foundation of my youth. Suddenly, just getting rid of a car that I couldn't easily replace seemed kind of extreme. It's a nice car, it's a pleasure to drive, it runs well, and it's paid for. Part of me really does like driving.

On the other hand, the car needs cleaning, an oil change, some air in the tires, and, sometime in the next year or so, new brakes. And driving somewhere once a week just to keep an unneeded car viable seems silly and wrong.

I don't know. I haven't decided yet, I guess.

One of the greatest things that can happen in online fandom life is to discover even more common ground than fandom with someone, and make a real-life friend, one you enjoy meeting in person.

I had that experience with kis. We connected online in the Firefly fandom way back in 2003 (god! could it have been that long ago?). I met her in person for the first time at a 2005 con in London (where we had the most squeeingly great time), and got a personalized tour of Edinburgh a year later when I was back in the UK for non-fannish purposes. Met Mr Kis and "the Son and Heir", both delightful gentlemen, and brought home wonderful memories.

So now, kis and Mr Kis are coming to see me! They've planned a trip to the US centering around Jellystone Park, and because hey, coming-all-this-way, etc., they are going to fly first to Stumptown solely on the strength of my living here. Well, that, and Mt St Helens.

We have tons of plans involving volcano-climbing, bookstore-wandering, augite-hunting, beach-going, possibly bike-riding, friends-meeting, food-eating and generally good-time-having, before they rent a car and drive eastward into the Rockies to go see Old Faithful and fly home out of Denver.

The very-clever arrangement we've come up with is for them to take over my humble house while they're here. (I, meanwhile, will stay across the street at my sister's house. My house is way too small for three people.)

This is all going to happen in early September. Between now and then, I must put my house in order. I'm used to my house, but that's no reason to inflict it as it is on wonderful friends from lands far away, right?

Accordingly, I'm implementing 15M4K, Fifteen Minutes For Kis. I will spend (a minimum of) fifteen minutes every day making, doing, or fixing something about the house and grounds that will make their stay more enjoyable. Remodeling, it ain't. It's more of an extension of Project Empty.

First up: Prune the crazy kiwi vine that's threatening to tear down my porch. *goes outside with garden shears*

Okay, that's done. Next? The Secret Closet of Clutter.

I believe that a person can live comfortably in 600 square feet. Graciously, even, provided those square feet are well-designed.

One thing has bugged me since I moved into my comfortable little 600-square foot house, years ago: about ten percent of the space in here is absolutely wasted. That ten percent could be the dining area I've never had, and recapturing it would make the difference between comfortable and gracious.

That's what my "kitchen remodel in a weekend" is all about. The kitchen needs to shrink so the living room can expand to hold a dinner table and four chairs.

But here's the problem: for the kitchen to be smaller, dammit, I need appliances and fixtures on a European scale, not "family-sized" American ones. Why does it cost a freakin' fortune to live in a smaller space? Why does a 24" refrigerator cast twice as much as a 36" one?

But I soldier on.

( Progress. )

Project Empty is back.

( Well, sort of. )

My least favorite conversation in the world is the one that I had too often as a younger woman, that goes, well here's what I ate today and what did you eat today and blah-blah-diet-obsession.

So it's taken a couple of months of radically diminished appetite to find out that I'm not the only one it's happening to. Several people of my acquaintance--mostly women, but including one man, and in a range of ages--report the same thing.

Anecdotally, it seems that a reduction of 25 to 50 percent in caloric intake is just kind of happening.

I can't help wondering if there's a collective, unconscious belt-tightening happening, in response to hard times.

I spent six bucks on three honeycrisp apples at Whole Foods the other day, and all I can say is, it's a damn good thing I'm not eating much anymore.

Apparently, pleonexia is the condition I've been battling, with extremely variable success, since I started Project Empty: Get Rid of All My Crap.

A.Word.A.Day
with Anu Garg

pleonexia
PRONUNCIATION:
(pli-uh-NEK-see-uh)

MEANING:
noun: Excessive or insatiable covetousness.

ETYMOLOGY:
From Greek pleonektein (to be greedy), from pleion (more) + ekhein (have).

USAGE:
"Don McClanen thinks a condition called pleonexia has overtaken the U.S. 'Pleonexia is an insatiable need for more of what I already have, and it has penetrated our culture to the point where people are angry at the poor,' he states."

--Jaye Scholl; Don McClanen Offers the Wealthy a Different Kind of Freedom; Barron's (New York); Sep 18, 2000.

Today I pruned some shrubs, cleared a patch of ground for future vegetable gardening, planted an apple tree, baked bread, helped avventura1234 build a raised bed, bought a cabbage to make my own sauerkraut (per instructions from the class I took at Preserve last week), and bought some organic raw milk to make my own yogurt. And a jar to make my own kombucha.

I'm turning into some kind of...hippie. Or pioneer. Or something. It's very weird.

So anyway, my reward for a day of urban farming-related busyness was a long cool shower, followed by hot bread with more melty butter than is strictly consistent with best dietary practices, and some Due South. (I still don't have the whatever to watch the very last episode, though.)

Tomorrow: gonna make manapua, start the yogurt and the sauerkraut, and go see the new Callum Keith Rennie movie X-Files movie with my mom and my niece, three generations of X-Philes whether Chris Carter deserves us or not.

Nothing in my spendidly leisurely day yesterday prompted me to run any practical errands. Today, I looked around the kitchen and consulted my stomach, and realized that I needed some food.

So my experiment today was running errands without a car on Sunday afternoon.

( A surprising success. Thank you, Tri-Met. )