“You might say clutter is a way of avoiding life.” – Don Aslett in How To Lose 200 Pounds This Weekend (©2000), another decluttering book, and definitely one of the best there is! Every so many pages I found myself getting up off the sofa to work through another box of stuff. I tossed out things I’ve been lugging around for years… decades… even that I’ve had since I was a little kid! The Korn’s Bakery wrapping paper roll is gone. A dozen pieces of rusty O-gage toy train track are gone. Two bags of clothes, mostly t-shirts, are gone. My collection of seven Elvira, Mistress of the Dark / Coors Beer standup displays, dating back to 1987, are gone, folded up in the cardboard recycling bin. Those were tough to part with, but how likely is it that I’m going to ever set up an Elvira beer display in any room of my house? I checked prices on eBay before ditching stuff. The Elvira displays might have been worth thirty bucks apiece,  but shipping costs from where I currently live made selling them untenable. I threw out an old Marx toy metal barn. That was really hard. My brothers and I got that set from our grandparents when we were very young. Sadly, in addition to being ungainly to store, the barn had rusted quite badly. I did, however, keep the farm animals and accessories. I also tossed a plastic model kit of a London bus I purchased only a couple of years ago. I was swayed by a “fun” looking photo group on Flickr combined with a visit to the annual Honolulu NNL model car show to spend eighty dollars – eighty dollars – buying a plastic model kit. I had started on it, didn’t get very far, and it’s been taking up a lot of space ever since. The likelihood that I will spend my free time building a huge plastic model of a double-decker bus is pretty slim right now. I have too much other stuff to do, both things I need to do and things I “should” be doing. The bus model was so far on the back burner that it was never gonna happen. Tossing that felt like tearing up dollar bills – more like, tearing up a handful of twenty dollar bills – but it’s done, it’s gone, time to keep moving.

Last week we rented a storage unit to help with the decluttering. After reading How To Lose 200 Pounds This Weekend, I realize there are probably at least two large tubs of stuff I’ve already hauled to storage that I’m ready to part with. Next trip, I’m bringing those two tubs home and purging them.

Even though they’re beginning to sound a bit dated in some respects (the technology world, in particular, has changed a lot in the past fifteen years), Don Aslett’s decluttering books are definitely still the best on the market.