Archive for August, 2010

empty storage unit

Saturday, August 28th, 2010

Despite being a bit repetitive here – but every hero needs a mention:

these are the pictures of the amount of rubbish we moved out of a Storage unit here in Sydney last Friday.
And believe it or not, it took just 3 hours.
On top of this we decided on 7 boxes of books to be sold at the upcoming garage sale and took them from the storage unit back to the house to be ready to go.
The only things that were left are photo albums (which will come into the house after as much as possible has been sold at the sale) and Christmas decoration. For that we found space in the attic, so, by the end of the month, this storage unit will be empty and $ 55 a month saved.

Scrapbooking kills…

Monday, August 9th, 2010

… not necessarily people but definitely relationships.

I am coming across a lot of people with an oversupply of scrapbooking material. To an extent that there are three kids bunking in one room, because the second bedroom is completely overtaken by paper products and ribbons.

Most scrap bookers are very fast to admit, that they do love scrapbooking, but never have enough time to produce the page about  little Tom’s  christening (little Tom being big Tom in the meantime and finishing High School).

And that they love shopping for the material much more than actually sitting down and doing it.

I love paper and anything crafty or stationery myself – I mean really love it. (I still have big sheets of special paper from studying Interior Architecture some 20 years ago… and a couple of notebooks from the Czech Republic from before the iron curtain was lifted!!)

But I would never even contemplate scrapbooking. The reason being, that  a day has just 24 hours.

So let’s do the math and see where you would find the 50 hours it takes to finish a scrapbooked photo album:

7 hours for sleeping, 1 for cooking, ½ for cleaning and tidying, 1 for driving the kids around. 1 for helping with homework, 1 for eating breakfast lunch and dinner, 2 for watching TV, 1 for reading a book, 8 for working in a payed job, 1 for getting to and from work.

That already equals 23.5 hours. All this doesn’t’ include the weekly activities like shopping for groceries, exercising every second day. In these 23.5 hours you haven’t talked to anyone, didn’t drink a beer with a mate, haven’t done the gardening or cleaned the windows. You haven’t taken the kids on a day to the zoo or had just half an hour with nothing planned.

Because that’s what I would like to do with the half hour – just have nothing planned.

So give your scrapbooking material to a toddler, watch him have fun with it for a couple of hours and happily chuck the leftovers in the bin!

And now: enjoy half an hour with nothing planned!!!!!