Leaving Las Vegas

I just got home from five days in Las Vegas with my husband. We have had a few short trips (one or two nights) without the kids, but they were always nearby, and always an easy drive from home. This was a real trip on an airplane that took me far, far away from home, in every sense.

It always amazes me how much work it is to get ready for a trip. There are mountains of laundry to do, shopping for food that I am not going to eat, and writing lists and more lists for the grandparents of everything the kids, cat, and dog will need to do while we are gone. Whew!

Packing for me is so easy. Some clothes, two pairs of shoes, makeup, toiletries … It all fits in one carry-on suitcase— if I can live out of one small bag for several days,  why do I need so much stuff in the rest of my life?

Some observations on the trip … in no particular order.

Travel

For all my husband’s complaining about traveling, it is really pretty nice. Since he flies so much, he often gets free upgrades to First Class. He got one this time too, at least for one leg of the trip, and he talked the airline into upgrading me as well. I got to live the high life from Denver to Las Vegas with my big, cushy seat and my free bloody mary whilst all the peasants in coach fought over their armrests. Let them eat cake! Mwahahhahaha.

Anyway …

I have always lived in the Northeast, which is pretty densely populated (or “thickly settled” as they say here in New England) From the Rockies on westward there seems to be hundreds and hundreds of miles of open deserts and canyons with no signs of human life. We did fly right over the Grand Canyon, though, which looks really cool.

The Grand Canyon from the sky

The VIP treatment

Bigger is always better

The scale and scope of everything in Las Vegas is ridiculous. The casino/shopping/theme park/nightclub/pool party extravaganza that is each hotel along the Strip is like nothing I have ever seen. Each hotel is unbelievably large and intentionally confusing to navigate, making it too easy to get lost, for better or worse. The grand scale of everything also makes it difficult to judge how far away anything is. You can walk along the strip for what seems like an awfully long time and still be in front of the same hotel. I was still getting disoriented in my own hotel on the last day of the trip. Maybe they rearrange everything while everyone is asleep. We kept calling this disorienting weirdness “eating the lotus flowers. “ If you ever saw The Lightning Thief, you know what I mean. I ended up sending and receiving a lot of text messages that said things like “uh oh. Lotus flowers” whenever we were trying to meet up somewhere.

$10 beers and $8 band-aids

For some reason I always thought that Las Vegas was supposed to be relatively cheap to visit, since the hotels make the big bucks off all the gambling, so everything else is inexpensive to lure people in. This is not so. Not at all. Everything was twice as much as it would be in a restaurant or bar or nightclub at home, but lucky for us, it is a work expense for my husband, so we only have to pay for half, so it works out to be about the same … this sounds like the lotus flowers talking again …

Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em

I had no idea people still smoked so much. Here in New England, smoking isn’t allowed indoors anywhere anymore, so I really don’t see it very much. It was weirdly shocking to see so many people smoking. I know that sounds dumb and obvious, but it really was surprising to me. I expected it from the college-age party crowd, but not so much from everyone else.

I am not 22

I had 4 beers one night and I was as loopy as I ever want to be out in public. I was in bed every night before midnight. I wore a skirty, 50s-style bathing suit. I sat in the shade at the pool.  I read books. I often thought the music was too loud. I was yawning every night when a lot of people were just starting their evening out. I thought the girls walking the strip in their string bikinis with their half-yards of margaritas and half in the bag already should go back to the hotel and put some more clothes on.

Feelin hot hot hot

But it’s a dry heat …

Good holy Hell it was hot. I love the heat, and I didn’t mind the weather one bit, but it was hot hot hot. Really hot. Like 110 degrees. What I didn’t expect was the complete and total lack of humidity. My hair did not frizz. I did not sweat. There was no drippy condensation on the outside of my frosty iced coffee. It was weird.

I just don't know where I would wear these ...

Fashion sense

People wear some wacky stuff, which is fine, mostly. There is something confusing about having people in bathing suits, sparkly evening clothes, orthopedic shoes and fanny packs all together in one place at any time of the day or night. Also, a note on tattoos: I don’t have a problem with tattooing per se, but I think in a few years the full-arm-sleeve tattoos and excessive tattooing in general will go the way of MC Hammer pants and Mall Hair — leaving a lot of people stuck in a fashion trend they can’t get out of.

Doing everything I set out to do

My husband was at a conference during the day so my “to-do” list every day was as follows:

·      drink the coffee and eat the breakfast that my husband brought to the room while I was still in bed.

·      lounge around in my jammies for a while.

·      Shower and get dressed and take a long walk before it got too hot.

·       Meet my husband for lunch.

·      Get an iced coffee and bring it to the pool where I would spend the whole afternoon reading.

·      Meet my husband for drinks and dinner.

I love the feeling of accomplishment I get when I finish everything on my list.

The heart grows fonder

I really needed some “grown-up” time where I could just do whatever I wanted, even if what I wanted to do was really nothing at all, and it was great. I also missed my kids. Not every second, but I was away from them for long enough to really miss them and really want to get back. I didn’t miss the laundry and the dishes and the lunchbox packing, but it was nice to get back to my babies.

Me vs The Universe

It is said that the Universe is always moving toward a state of entropy. Chaos wins over. When we try to control the nature of the universe, we lose every time. The chaotic Universe is definitely winning. That said, May has been kind of a bust. I started off the month all gung-ho to get rid of all my superfluous stuff. Here on the first day of June, all I can say is “eh.”

I got some stuff out of here — mostly outgrown kids clothes, kids papers, and some of my own clothes that I no longer like or wear. But there is so much more to do.

I started off strong. At the beginning of the month my kids’ school had an electronics/softgoods recycling drive, and I got a lot of stuff out of my attic. But cleaning stuff out of my attic that I don’t ever see unless I am going up there to put something else I don’t need “in storage” isn’t really all that satisfying. I don’t spend much time in the attic. I need to get rid of stuff in the rest of the house.

The Happiness Project and the Fly Lady and all those Real Simple magazines that taunt me from my nightstand all talk about being “liberated” from all the clutter in your house. That it is “exhilarating” to get rid of stuff you don’t need and be surrounded only by the things you really love and that are useful and beautiful. I am not feeling liberated. Every day that I go through stuff in my house and weed out what needs to go, my kids come home with piles of artwork and school projects. Their teachers are emptying out their classrooms and filling up my house with more stuff.

It is slowly getting better, but I still feel like if I stop this constant effort to get rid of things, I will be engulfed by the clutter. I want to believe I should embrace the chaos. Chaos fuels creativity. Or insanity. Or something, I’m sure. Please understand that I am not a neat freak. I don’t really expect to have a pristine home all the time. Or ever, really. I just don’t want to feel like I will be swallowed by all the papers and shoes and laundry and sports equipment and puppy toys that seem to be everywhere all the time. I can’t fight the forces of the universe. They are too much for me.

Tick tick tick BOOM

The countdown is on till summer vacation, and right now, I am not entirely dreading it. Not yet, anyway. This school year seems to have flown by, probably because we never really had winter and the school year was just a blur of 60 degree days. Not that I’m complaing about a winter with almost no snow, mind you. I grew up in a town that averages more than 100 inches of snow a year. I have seen enough snow. But ready or not, summer is upon us. My kids are done on June 15, so that leaves me just a few short weeks to figure out what I’m going to do with them. I love summer, but summer vacation can be a little, um, trying, with three kids. This year will be different! At least I hope it will … Here’s what we have ahead of us:

The Good:

Not getting up at 6am. I hate, hate, hate getting up early and even though “sleeping late” in my house means getting up around 7:30, I am happy to have the extra sleepytime.

Not packing lunches: I have one vegetarian kid, two kids who won’t take cheese to school, one kid who the only sandwich she’ll eat is peanut butter & honey, and a strict “no nuts of any kind” policy at school. Packing lunches is a colossal pain in the ass.

Easy daytrips. We live just outside of Boston, so trips to the beach, the mountains and the city are all easy to do, and usually fun for everybody. My husband and I may do a few surprise outings for the kids, where we just wake them up, tell them what to pack and get them in the car, but not tell them where we’re going. So mysterious!

Not-so-little kids. My kids are finally old enough to just “go out and play.” There are a lot of kids their age on our suburban, dead-end street (sorry — cul-de-sac) so the kids can ride their bikes or play capture the flag or just play with whoever happens to be around. My kids are all old enough that they don’t need to be watched every second. Hurray!

Vacations   Most of the trips we have taken in the summer have been to our time-share condo in New Hampshire, which is a short drive away, the kids love it, and it has a huge pool and lots of nearby outdoor attractions. The bad part is to me, it is not really a vacation. I am still doing laundry and making meals and breaking up fights, just like at home. It is great for my husband, who has a week of from his 60+ hour a week job, but for me, it is really just the same thing with different scenery. This summer, we are trading our time share for a week in Aruba, and hopefully (after spending a small fortune on plane tickets and passports) this will feel like a real vacation.

The Bad

Activities are crazy expensive: My town’s recreation department offers a lot of summer classes and camps that are reasonably inexpensive, but I have three kids and the cost can add up quick. The “real” day camps can cost hundreds of dollars a week. I work (when I work) out of my home, so I don’t really have to find supervised activities for them, but they will be mighty bored after a few weeks off from school. Every year my kids complain that they don’t have any school in the summer. My kids are weird.

The beaches nearby are really beautiful, but most of them cost $20 or more to just park my car. There are a few amusement parks nearby ($$$) and Boston is full of activities from museums to whale watches. They are all really fantastically fun, and really flippin’ expensive.

2 to 1 disagreement split: Pretty much anything I say to my kids on any given day from “Let’s go to the beach!” to “You have a dentist appointment” or even “let’s go out for ice cream!” is met with this:

Kid 1: YAY!

Kid 2: YAY!

Kid 3: AW, man … do we have to? (stomps off in a huff)

It isn’t always the same kid who doesn’t want to do whatever it is we are doing, but there is always someone who disagrees. Sometimes, the outlier kid gives in; sometimes it escalates into a full blown snit. I spend an awful lot of time dealing with children grumping about something everyone knows they will end up doing anyway. The prospect of doing that several times a day for two and a half months makes me wish for year-round school.

I never seem to get anything done in the summer: When we are all really busy with deadlines and school projects and dance classes and sports, I manage to be pretty productive because I know I have finite blocks of time to accomplish whatever it is I need to do. Summer vacation is full of unstructured time where we don’t have to do anything on most days. A few days of lazing around is relaxing. Many, many days of lazing around is something more like stagnant and unmotivating than relaxing. Sigh.

I need to make a real plan for what I am going to do this summer to head off some of these troubles before they start. I need to find out all the fun FREE stuff around here. I need to figure out how to get my kids to agree on something. I need to get crackin’ because time is running out!

When one cliché isn’t enough ...

I feel like I have fallen off the blogwagon. I feel like I have fallen off a few wagons, actually. One step forward, two steps back, as they say. By the way — I Googled images for “falling off the wagon” and most of what I found were pictures of Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan and David Hasselhoff. Har har har.

Anyway, as I write this, I am surrounded by some pretty big piles of paper to sort, most of which are kids school papers and drawings and some of which are little scrappy lists of things I want to do. One of the lists says I am going to organize all my craft crap that is taking over the basement and clean out the “tool room” which is essentially the “room filled with crap we don’t know what to do with.” I know I can get through all these papers in the small window of time I have before kids come home (with more papers) and I need to help with snacks and homework and sports pickups, and all the usual afterschool stuff. Actually I have to do it before they get home and get the big bags of paper recycling out of the house and into the back of my car before the kids see what I am doing with all their precious drawings and spelling tests and corrected homework and FREAK OUT. See — I have a deadline and it gets done. No deadline and  … nothing. No motivation whatsoever.

I know I am making slow, steady progress in this mission to declutter my house, my head, and my life,  but I worry that I am regressing to my old ways and letting things pile up when I should deal with them right away. Some progress is better than no progress, but mostly I just look around my house and I am dismayed by all the stuff that I just don’t know what to do with. When I was in college, everything I owned could fit in my car. Not anymore. I could easily fill my car with the stuff I need to get rid of. Time to get back on the horse. Or back in the saddle. Whatever. I need to get on it.

Should it stay, or should it go now

I have read countless magazine articles, blogs, and books about how to liberate oneself from one’s belongings. I have watched lots of episodes of Clean House (but I’ve never watched Hoarders) and I know that I am not the only person who has trouble letting go of stuff. I also know that things could definitely be a lot worse. Things could also be a lot better.

We have some big things to get rid of, like a huge armoire that used to hold a TV and a funky metal and wood bookshelf. We don’t use these things anymore, they don’t fit in our house or with our décor, but they just seem so … useful. They are storage units, for crying out loud, so we shouldn’t get rid of them when they can help corral all of our random crap right?

About all that random crap … we have so much stuff in this house. The problem I am discovering is that most of this stuff is not actually mine. I don’t have a problem getting rid of my stuff, most of the time. I get rid of my stuff all the time, or more accurately, I don’t seem to acquire a lot of stuff tor me. Instead, my house is filled with papers, artwork, books, toys, stuffed animals, ill-fitting clothes, and random do-dads that are important to someone else.

This leaves me two choices. I can make an executive decision about the fate of other people’s things, and suffer the consequences it brings, or the better choice … they can do it. The problem lies in making them make the right choice, which is of course, the choice I would make. I do use the executive decision method a lot of the time. I have thrown away tons of papers and little junky toys and amateur artwork that no one has ever missed. I can’t do that with everything. My kids are at an age where they can decide what they feel has sentimental value or is “special to them” and they want to keep.

Unfortunately, they feel that way about a lot of things. Sometimes these feelings are really misdirected, like the time my daughter cried when we threw away a broken shower head, but most of the time, they want what because they want to remember certain events or certain people and I don’t think I should tell them they can’t. I still have a shoebox full of notes that friends wrote to me in middle school. I still have my prom corsage and Rubles from a high school trip to Russia. I have boxes and boxes of my kids’ artwork, particularly cute clothes they wore as babies, hair from their first haircuts, and practically everything they touched in the hospital when they were born. I understand wanting to keep things for sentimental reasons. But how do I help them understand that they don’t need to save all of it?

Out with the old

Give it away May is off to a good start! At the electronics/soft goods recycling drive, I managed to clear a lot of stuff out of my attic that we definitely don’t need. Every computer we have ever owned has found its final resting place in our attic, and most of them are still there. I did manage to get rid of a huge tangle of cables, a pile of chargers that no longer have anything to charge, several speakers, two DVD players, a TIVO and a box for the Dish Network (we had a satellite dish in our old house about ten years ago) and a Sony Discman. All of it is gone, gone, gone. I also got rid of a pile of ugly tablecloths and a whole mess of stuffed animals (shhhhh … don’t tell.)

I have a bag of clothes and shoes that my daughters have outgrown that I am giving to a very fashionable five-year-old friend. I also have a Kelty Kid Carrier that will be going on Craigslist. I had planned to clean out my garage this past week, but it has been raining every. single. day. So that hasn’t happened yet.

What has been happening is more Kindle Cases! YAY!!! There has been a lot of interest in my Etsy store (but no sales, yet) and a local gift store wants to see some samples. I have a few other ideas for potential Etsy items, so stay tuned!

Give it away, give it away, give it away.

Happy May Day everyone!

So April was about breaking bad habits that I felt were holding me back. One of those habits was griping about my cluttered house, but not doing much about it. All that is about to end, because for the next 30 days, I will be giving stuff away!! Some of it will go to charities, some of it will be sold on Craigslist, some will go to specific people, and some will be recycled, but most importantly. IT WILL NOT BE IN MY HOUSE ANYMORE.

A lot of people (myself included) seem to be bogged down both physically and psychologically by the sheer amount of stuff in their lives. Now, we are not quite at the point that the Hoarders people are knocking on the door, but we definitely have a lot of stuff that we have outgrown, don’t want, don’t need, or don’t use. My friend, Holly, writes a fabulous blog called Good Karma Housekeeping. One of the ideas she writes about a lot is finding the right home for items she no longer wants or needs. Another friend of mine, Runi, has decided not to acquire any new stuff for an entire year. As much as I love both of these ideas, my biggest concern right now is just getting stuff OUT.

My kids’ school is having a recycling drive tomorrow for electronics and soft goods, so I will be able to get rid of my dead food processor, and probably a lot of stuff in my attic like the piles and piles of stuffed animals that live up there.

Hopefully  by the end of the month I can put a significant dent in the amount of unneeded stuff that clutters up my house. I will be posting my progress here, but I will probably only be blogging two or three times a week. Keep reading! I might be giving away something you could use!