Mondays. Usually they are the start of the new work week and the harbinger of another five days of constantly having to answer questions. Not today though. Today it was a day of sleeping in, cooking a nice meal and starting the big spring cleaning process that I’ve been wanting to do for a couple of weeks now. The weekends are always too short to do projects like this though so it’s nice that I have more time now to really dive into all the stuff I’ve been hoarding and, hopefully, getting rid of a lot of it. Today I started with personal hygiene and care products and also learned how to shave. Working at the head office of a big drugstore chain has gotten me a lot of free stuff on the make-up, shower, perfume, and body care spectrum. A lot of stuff that I don’t use or that has gone bad over the years of not using it up. I dove into two bags and a crate of the stuff and ended up with two bags full of things that I could throw out. Body creams and sunblock gone bad. Perfumes that were free samples but smelled absolutely horrible. Hairsprays that didn’t really work anymore and the list goes on. It felt liberating throwing everything out and now I’m left with a crate of stuff that I actually use and keep in my bathroom. It’s mostly shampoo/conditioner, shower gels and foams, body care products and some toothpaste. I’m prepared for summer with two different types of sunblock and some after sun. I also own a ton of facial cleansing products since I like to clean my face before I go to bed and put night cream on so I feel clean and hydrated in the morning. I notice that next to working towards a cleaner and less cluttered house, it’s also decluttering my brain. Not having to be annoyed at random bags in my bedroom anymore feels really nice. Being left with stuff that I know that I will actually use is even nicer. I don’t want to say that I’m a minimalist, because I’m really not, but I don’t want to take stuff home with me anymore that I know I won’t use that someone else actually will. So now I’m left with the necessities and it’s making me happy. I also realized that I’ve owned Animal Crossing for more than 10 days on my Switch now which means that I can actually see how much time I’ve put into the game so far. According to my Switch it’s somewhere between 15 and 20 hours. Which means I’m playing a little over an hour each day and that sounds about right. I’m actually not really actively working towards anything right now. I’m mostly just running around my island and making sure I dig up my fossils every day aswell as find the money rock and do some fishing and bug catching. I guess I’m aiming to get the next installment of my house paid so I can upgrade again and start making some individual themed rooms instead of the one big room I have now. I’m kind of amazed with how other people have shaped their island by all the pictures I see on Reddit and Twitter. I know a lot of people do “time traveling” to unlock stuff. Which basically means they’ve been tampering with their date and time settings on their Switch. Personally I don’t feel the need for that and instead am just doing my own thing. Which is fine aswell. I’m not sure why I suddenly feel the need to blog so much. Maybe without my work I finally have the headspace to focus on other things. If I had more than one week off I would have considered joining Blapril as active participant since it seems like writing is coming much more naturally now that I have the time. However since I have only one week off and my work will probably be slightly crazy as I get back to it I’m going to shy away from Blapril and just do what I feel like in the moment. No stress. No commitment. It’s nice for a bit.
Aeternus Gaming
Tackling an evergrowing backlog of games. But I'm also just an MMO junkie.
The “free stuff from work” sounds so familiar. I work in a very large bookstore and we get a never-ending torrent of free books, mostly pre-publication proofs. You’d think that in an environment where everyone reads obsessively that would be a good thing, and it is, mostly. But even voracious readers can only get through so much and an awful lot of what publishers would like us to know about isn’t to anyone in the shop’s taste. And because proofs cannot legally be sold, distributed or even given away, they just pile up in huge stacks until eventually someone has to sort them out and send them to be recycled.
I used to bring home anything I thought there was even a small chance I might read one day but after working there for nearly twenty years that’s no longer remotely in my thoughts. I try to limit myself only to things I plan on reading in the next week or two – and even then I end up with plenty of stuff I just never get around to reading. This would be a good opportunity to sort out a load of failed reads to take to the recycling center… only the recycling center is closed and even if it was open current lockdown rules wouldn’t allow me to visit it.
On the positive side, if this goes on long enough maybe I’ll actually be glad to read some of those also-rans…
I’m in exactly the same spot when it comes to my work. Because it’s personal care and beauty stuff it’s so easy to start taking things home with the idea that I may use it some day. I’ve since stopped doing that and only take home the stuff that I actually will use in the near future. Having a year supply of toothpaste isn’t all that when you actually need to store it somewhere…
Books are a whole other level. Since I physically just can’t store more it’s easy to not pile up on them.
I’ve also been using the self-quarantine to organize the house up. My brain also seems to just run less efficiently when there is clutter everywhere.
It’s so nice isn’t it? I just wish I had gotten to hanging up some shelves before the whole quarantine mess so I could start displaying some of my collection instead of having it sit under my bed, taking up storage space. Oh well.