All posts by Chaos Coordinator

About Chaos Coordinator

B.Sc. Journalism, University of Oregon, USA. M.A.Ed, Elementary Education, University of Phoenix, USA.

19.

100 Days,

I looked at my LiveJournal account today for the first time in a year. Yes, it’s been almost exactly a year. It must be a February thing, because the last time I updated LJ was February 2014.

Three of my LJ contacts still post. Zannah is posting daily, chatty, entertaining slice-of-life vignettes. Her posts are actually RSS feeds from her blog, Vox Machina. SjonSvenson posts at least a few times a week, generally with brief observations from the office in which he works. LilRonGal posts a few times a month. Pretty much everybody else seems to have given up on LJ completely around 2012.

LiveJournal is owned by a Russian conglomerate now. There are options on the home page for viewing the site in Cyrillic.

LJ friend DBlume responded to my LJ lament with a comment:

It’s only thanks to RSS that I get notified that you posted. Don’t bother being sad about LiveJournal’s transition. Life is change. Do you have any other online haunts nowadays?

“Life is change.” Yes, for most people it is, I suppose. I went back and looked at my first few LiveJournal posts, from back in 2002. Marc 2002, in fact. The first post is about having nothing to say. That hasn’t changed. The third post is something about decluttering. About trying to thin out my possessions. Thirteen years of writing about the same stuff and doing the same stuff.

Obviously life is not always change, at least not for all of us. My life doesn’t seem to have changed. I’m older. I’m fatter. I’m poorer. And I’m whining about the exact same stuff as I was thirteen years ago.

I wonder if I can set up an RSS feed so ChamberOfChaos will post to LiveJournal?

18.

100 Days,

The Clutter Cure (©2007) by Judi Culbertson is a sort of hybrid between the “psychological approach” and the “practical approach” to decluttering. The book includes a few worksheets, but not so many as to serve as a distraction as with other books. The approach Culbertson suggests is to go through each room and make lists based on various criteria before starting the actual cleaning out and discarding. She’s realistic enough, and approaches the subject with enough humor, to admit that sometimes she simply wants to tell her clients (particularly when it comes to paper hoarding), “get rid of all of it!”

17.

100 Days,

The WASC accreditation visitation is finally finished at work. That should help alleviate some of the work-related stress… and the work-related, time-wasting busy-work we’ve been doing. Now I need to get caught up on IEP plans, get ready for SBAC testing, and, y’know, actually teach the kids some stuff.

12.

100 Days

Put up a “for sale” sign in front of the house. Cleaned and did some minor repairs around the house. No calls regarding the house.

There’s still too much clutter, despite now having filled the 8x7x5 storage unit and donating or discarding what seems like a lot of stuff.

11.

100 Days, , , ,

I quickly began to wonder if Clutter Busting by Brooks Palmer (©2009) was some kind of joke. The book reads as though it were written by Stuart Smalley, a character from the old Saturday Night Live program. “You’re good enough, you’re smart enough, and doggone it, you don’t need this stuff to feel special!” That line pretty well sums up the two-hundred pages of this tepid book. In fact, this book was so anti-inspirational it almost made me want to go out and buy something in order to feel better.

At work today I helped toss out a lot of stuff from the counseling office, including three old electric typewriters — not “cool” old typewriters, but hideous beige plastic typewriters from the late-1980s or early 1990s that were broken and missing their power cords and ribbon cartridges. We also tossed out three computer towers that had stopped working years ago, and multiple dust-covered boxes of miscellaneous outdated forms, policy manuals, and worn-out office supplies.

Still no action on the house listing, even though the listing has been picked up by most of the local real estate web sites.