The Freedom of Fewer Choices

How much do I love shopping at Trader Joe's? Sooooo much! There are too many reasons to list. Here are the top 3:

1. Every single time I've been there with Pia, one of the TJs "crew" has offered to help me take my groceries to the car and they've loaded up the trunk and whisked away my shopping cart before I've even gotten my wiggly babe into her car seat.

2. Black bean and cheese tacquitos. Chocolate honey mints. Reduced Guilt Chunky Guacamole.

3. A break from the Decision Fatigue of every other grocery store in town. When I want to buy, say, cereal, there are roughly a dozen options from which to choose. Pasta sauce? Eight options. Pickles? Spears, slices, or whole. Ketchup? One option: ketchup. I can be in and out of TJs with (usually, almost) everything I need for the week in 30 minutes, AND stick to a list and budget.

Bonus: The store is not jam-packed with displays and aisles. It feels open, navigable, and easy. You could fit the entire store into the Halloween Candy section of Target.

Does Trader Joe's have everything I could ever need for a recipe? No. But by narrowing our ingredient options, we've actually gotten more creative in the kitchen, and we are able to go to Whole Paycheck less frequently, which saves us a whole lot of money. And time. Shopping at TJs is efficient, cost-effective, and delicious.

I am pining for the day that our home will be conscientiously curated to contain only those Useful, Beautiful things that Spark Joy, like the Joy that is sparked by finding Gluten Free Candy Cane Joe Joes.

Like my favorite grocery store, I've found that my house is much tidier, more efficient, and happier to live in when I have fewer options. This is and has been an ongoing process, but every little step I have taken in the direction of Fewer has been rewarding so far.

Exhibit A:

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to apply the now-famous Marie Kondo lessons of Tidying Up to my closet. I haven't actually read her book (who has time to read entire books during baby naps??), but I have read a couple of reviews and articles about her New York Times bestseller, and concluded that I had gleaned enough to take a stab at purging my closet of anything that didn't Spark Joy.

I took every item of clothing out of my closet, laid them all on my bed, then picked each item up and held it in my hands before deciding its fate. I made four piles:

• Sparks Joy AND it currently fits!
• Sparks Joy but doesn't fit my new, plush, post-baby body
• No Joy here, but I've barely worn it, so I'll try to consign it
• No Joy, but it's in good shape, so I'll donate it

No surprise, most of what Sparked Joy and Fits consisted of cardigans and a couple of forgiving dresses and skirts. I'm still about 15 pounds from my pre-baby weight, so I'm going to remain hopeful that some of those Joy-sparking clothes with buttons and darts and zippers will fit again. I didn't part with them; I put them in a plastic tub in the storage closet. Here's what was left:

Disregard the upper-right piles - they are Les's pants!

I've been operating from this wardrobe of roughly 30 items + basics like tank tops, t-shirts, leggings, etc, for three weeks now, and I love it. When I rush to the closet in the morning to get ready for work, I know that everything in front of me fits, flatters (reasonably well), and makes me happy when I wear it. Soon I will add the winter sweaters that spark joy, but those are still packed away for now.

Gone are the sentimental items, the stash of overly-fussy wedding guest dresses from the season of my life when I attended 10 weddings every summer, and anything that I really wanted to like and wear but never or very rarely did. As I hear Kondo's book suggests, I thanked the items I discarded for their service or for their part in a previous season of my life, and stacked them neatly for re-homing.

Last year, I had a 40-Item Wardrobe for a season, and that was totally painless. Maternity clothes created their own capsule-wardrobe-by-default, and I did just fine for more than 6 months. I know I can live and work and play and go to church with a limited but versatile mix of clothes, but I still want More and New and Better and Different all the time. That's the part I can't quite seem to wrangle. And I do not promise that I will never buy any more clothes. No. But anything new must be versatile enough that I can wear it for at least two out of three main fashion venues: Regular Life, Work, Church. And, thanks to Ms. Kondo, it'll have to Spark Joy as well.

A Case Study in Will Power Failure

It's the 25th of July, and I have to say, I have done pretty well with this month's MISSION IMPOSSIBLE. I've talked myself out of numerous JCrew *Extra 30% Off!* sale purchases, and deleted my Anthropologie Summer Sale email without even opening it. I haven't even gone to Target this month.

But then this morning I got off the Metra at the train station and was dazzled by the UP TO 40% OFF! STORE CLOSING! posters slathered over every centimeter of the station Borders.

My heart pounded. I started talking myself down from the urge to loot the whole store. But I knew how this Blowout Sale would go down. By this afternoon, that store will look like a swarm of ravenous locusts had descended upon it. You'd just find a few Happy Horses 2011 calendars and some slow cooker cook books lying disheveled on the floor. Tumble weeds would blow through the aisles. People would be disassembling the book cases and carrying away the wood.

But still, I tried to resist. Until I saw a 40% OFF sign hanging from the magazine section.

Oh. Joy.

I felt a serious daze come over me, and I walked straight to the rack and yanked out 5 - YES FIVE - of the magazines I have not let myself ever buy. The magazines that I only graze my fingers over adoringly in book stores because I do not know anyone who subscribes, and I refuse to pay $6 for them.

Ok, technically I have bought Martha Stewart Weddings before, but only when I was engaged. And I can justify that one as a "work expense" for my wedding flower side gig. I have not justification for the other stuff.
So with just 7 days to go until the end of the No Buy July, I failed. I got a really super deal on something that never EVER goes on sale and brings me a great deal of enjoyment. But I still failed. I'm going to console myself with the decision to not crack them open until my vacation next month, since I would have inevitably bought magazines for the flight.

Sigh. I guess one $16 failure this month is still better than I do most months on impulse purchasing. Maybe I'll go over these mags in urgent, delighted detail on the plane and then realize that they were not worth the $16 or the mission failure. Or, maybe I'll remember that magazines are one of my chief joys in life and clutch them to my chest with glee. It could really go either way.

In the interest of full disclosure, I did also buy a very BIG purchase last week, but it was planned, budgeted for, and sales-stalked for quite a while. I'm on the fence about keeping it, but if I do, I'll definitely give it a Big Reveal on the blog.

From Envy, to Greed, to Pride, to.... Green?

When I saw my dear sister a couple of weekends ago, I eyed her new shoulder bag with cool envy. It was bright and springy, and the perfect size to carry all my essentials without being big enough to double duty as an overnight bag. I ran my hand over it's smooth fabric. My sister helpfully chimed in "Isn't it great? The fabric is made from recycled water bottles!" Now, of course, I had to have one. You know, to support the economics of the recycling life cycle.

Robyn got her Lilly Bloom bag, made with Karma Bloom fabric, from good old Marshall's - a favorite of ours for "I would never buy this full price, but since it's such a bargain..." retail therapy. To sweeten the deal, I also had a gift card for Marshall's, thanks to the recent return of a gift that didn't fit. 

So, despite the fact that I need another purse like I need a hole in the head, I gleefully came home from Marshall's last weekend with this lovely shoulder tote for a mere $7 of my own money:

It goes with everything!



It's got the perfect sleeve pocket in the back to hold my goes-everywhere-with-me notebook!

For the first couple of days, I was wearing the buzz of an awesome new purchase on my face. This bag made me smile. It was pretty, it looked cute with all my coats, and it was the perfect size.  Better yet, the pleather was just decorative, so I didn't need to worry about the pervasive purse-dooming pleather fraying that has sent more than a few of my fave purses to the heap. Or so I thought.

Wouldn't you know it, 4 days into my Fabulous New Life With My New Purse, the pleather on the sort of helpful/sort of bewildering top handle came unstitched:

Of course it did.

Now I'm debating about taking it back or just snipping the handle off all together. I don't particularly like bags with multiple handle options, but this bag is so light and soft, the top handle was actually kind of helpful for picking the bag up from the floor. Plus it added to its "I'm a tiny satchel bag! Look at how cute I am!" appeal.

The handle failure also serves as an excellent reminder that stuff is just stuff, and it will all end up being discarded eventually. I certainly didn't NEED this purse. I am enjoying it, though, broken handle and all. This whole experience is prompting me to be more structured and methodical about the new leaf of "not buying stuff" that I am supposedly turning over. I'm going to stew over this a bit more and get back to you with a more goal-oriented approach to STOP the madness of my stuff buying.

Cold-turkey has worked pretty well so far with the Diet Coke and the hair dye. Could I dare try to detox from buying things in a similar fashion? Gasp! Man, I'm glad I got this purse before I made that kind of deal with myself.

Friday Faceoff: Time vs. Money vs. The Planet

Today's Friday Faceoff is more of a pondering than a definitive contest. But I've been thinking about this a lot this week - How do you decide between these three things?  Are you generally consistent throughout your life and home, or do some decisions lean towards time, some towards money, and some towards Green?

I'd love to say that I always choose The Planet. Obviously, that would be a lie, or I wouldn't be sitting next to a small hill of used tissues when I could have used a handkerchief. But who uses a hanky? Is it even sanitary? Most people, even very earth-gentle people, will not blink about using disposable tissues (especially during allergy season) or TP (thank heaven), but what about other things?

Open my freezer, and you will see 2 frozen pizzas. Les and I love frozen pizzas, and thankfully, there are some very tasty options for around $5. They save time and money for sure, but they come in a cardboard box and are wrapped in their own little plastic shrink-wrap. They were shipped around the country and kept at freezing temperatures for their entire lifecycle. Our little pizzas have a pretty big footprint. Do I care? How much should I care?

I actually HAVE more time to put into things like cooking, composting, recycling, and general greening. Some of those things save money, even though they take a lot of time. Sometimes, though, it's a heckofa lot cheaper to buy a $5 tasty frozen pizza from Trader Joe's than to buy all the ingredients to make one. And then you have the chopping, and the inevitable food scraps. Hm.

I'm going to surf around and try to find an InfoGraphic about this. I'll let you know if I find a handy flowchart... But in the meantime...

When I was thinking about a reasonable way to make choices about these things, I had an idea to make a "Green Budget". Sort of like a monetary budget, but for the environment. The idea goes something like this: Determine all the positive things I'll commit to do every month/year and put them in one column, then put all the things I'm willing to wiggle around about, then list all the things I am not in a position to scrap or start doing in a third column. The goal is to make sure that the positive column is at least longer than the third column, and to start moving things from the middle column over to the first.
Like this:

Green Commitments
Change all the light bulbs to CFLs or LEDs
No more paper towels or napkins, except to clean up dog-related messes
Meat-free diet
Only local, organic eggs
Soy or almond milk, freeze leftovers before expiration date
Switch over all cleaning products to some combo of baking soda + vinegar
Use only bar soaps with little/no packaging in bathroom
Make my own laundry detergent
Let my gray hair grow out!
Walk or take public trans as much as reasonable
Use only reusable grocery bags
Recycle everything I possibly can
Stop buying ANYTHING new unless it can meet some stringent criteria
etc, etc....

Wiggling, considering
Trying again to grow our own herbs in the window?
Get a bike?
Community composting?
Selling and/or donating a LOT of our stuff?
Clothing swap?
Sewing up all the holes in ALL of my socks?
Handkerchief? Maybe?
Only replacing clothes items as they wear out, and trying to source organic cotton as much as possible?
Not buying ANY new plastic?
Sell one of the cars?
Limiting any food that comes in a package?
Try canning seasonal produce this summer?

OK to take a pass on...
Home-made/uber green dish washing detergent, until one that works is developed
Giving up the dog pee-pads in winter and just mopping the floor every single day
Trying to eat truly seasonally in Chicago in winter
All-natural deodorant
Upgrading to bamboo or organic cotton sheets, at least until the new wedding sheets have deteriorated
Going full-vegan
etc, etc....

Maybe that is a lot more trouble than it's worth. But for me, making a list of the things I am doing and/or commit to start doing helps me feel more "OK" about using a paper tissue or buying a frozen pizza. It can be helpful to see that you've already made some progress, and get an idea of things you're willing to try. Maybe that's just me. Thoughts? How do you make decisions about stuff like this?