Hey! I’m back and it is still 2011!

Not a lot of change, but I have come back to post! That is a big step, I hope.

A friend came by a few weeks ago and helped me by sweeping outside and straightening up things a bit. She also did me a great favour by cleaning my washroom… it sure takes a great friend to offer to clean your washroom. I mean it wasn’t a death trap by any means and I even do things like clean the toilet. But my friend has a little semi-professional experience at it and did it quickly and efficiently. Though I realize just how strong my OCD is when I felt very uncomfortable when some things weren’t quite in the right place. I am not so OCD that everything is always in the same place all the time. I do move things from time to time myself. Perhaps it is okay because I moved it… or because I chose where to move  it?

I was very surprised at how much that little bit of sweeping made outside.

Still much to do. Of course.

I am also trying to make inroads on my Internet Presence. I have a large “clutter” of websites out in the ether and some are basically orphaned. I want to resurrect some and perhaps drop some… though hoarding is something as hard with soft stuff as with hard stuff. You should see my hard drives. I am sure I have email hoarded from the 90’s! It is that attempt to “resurrect” some of my sites that got me back here.

I’ll let you know how things are going!

~ Dusty
D Cluttermouse

Clutter here Clutter there, Clutter can accumulate Everywhere!

Here is a question for you fellow clutterers… when was the last time you sorted through your bookmarks, favourites, or whatever you call the address of your favourite places on the Internet?

Do you go through them:

• Daily
• Weekly
• Monthly
• Seasonally
• Yearly
• Every once in a while you get a new computer and the browser is empty
• You can delete bookmarks?

I have to admit that I just never get rid of mine and in fact, I don’t even get a clear out when I change computers or browsers because I am computer savvy enough to be able to migrate my bookmarks.
I’d love to put up a poll of readers, but really don’t have any to speak of yet — however, I suspect a lot of people with cluttered homes would likely have cluttered bookmark lists as well as hard drives. Of course at the same time I know sometimes these organizational-emotional things don’t cross such boundaries, but I bet for many they do.

I know I bookmark many things just because they are just so very interesting and I want to be able to come back to them when I have time to really take a good look at them — others I want to share — others I just want to prove they exist — and being a writer, some I just want to be able to call on as a reference. Mind you for the last category I will most often cache the page on my own drive in case it might disappear into the ether on me.

I’m not sure I’ll ever get to really Spring Clean on my bookmark list, but… I do hope some day to put them into better order so I can find them more simply and also will have places for the new pages to roost.

~ Dusty
D Cluttermouse

More Than Just Stuff!

Clutter can be many things!

A person who has problems dealing with a clutter of clothing in their closet, or pop bottles under their porch can have issues in other areas too. For instance their bookshelves might be cluttered with more than books… or even nice displays of knickknacks…

A case in point is my computer. As much as I organize things, my hard drive space is very overcrowded. Who would have thought that a 120 Gigabyte hard drive would become nearly full so quickly! I just find it very difficult to get rid of any file once I have it on my computer. If I know that I have replaced something and that I won’t need to go back to the original… and I am 100% sure of that, then I can… most times.

Thankfully I have a DVD burner and can copy files onto DVD for archiving. That has meant that periodically I can copy my downloads directory onto a DVD and clear that space out. I can also take recorded media that I have downloaded and save that to DVD rather than leave it on my hard drive leaving only what I currently am listening to or viewing. It does make a difference.

Still… I can hardly figure out just where so much of my hard drive space has gone.

I do plan on getting an external hard drive for my notebook computer and that will be in the Terabyte size range. (1000 Gigabytes.) Still I hope to get my self organized so that I don’t clutter it up.

Sometimes it seems the more room we have, the more space we take up!

I remember when 1 Megabyte was HUGE!

~ Dusty
D Cluttermouse