Minimalist Wannabe

I found this Indian hippy top/dress thing at a garage sale a couple of years ago. I had such plans. I thought I would look bohemian cool in bare feet and a floppy hat making homemade bread. Instead I look like a frumpy house frau. Oh my shattered dreams. It will work for someone, I’m just not the one. I will lay my hippy dreams to rest and sell it in my own garage sale next spring.

P.S. A word about my garage sale plans… That’s not cheating is it? I am getting rid of stuff, just not throwing it in the trash or taking it to Goodwill right away. It’s out of my place and will be stored in my friend’s garage until next spring when we will have a garage sale and unload everything with the firm agreement that everything unsold will go straight to Goodwill. That’s not wrong is it?

If I am saying goodbye to muffin top jeans, I should probably say goodbye to my overly tight skinny jeans that make me look like a stuffed sausage.

Sigh.

Damn you muffin top.

These jeans would be great if I didn’t have an inner tube of flesh spilling out over the waistband. They are just too tight. They aren’t containing the gut and it is not a good look. If I could become a food minimalist, perhaps the muffin top would no longer be an issue.

If I can say good bye to glittery nail polish, I can bid farewell to my cadaver-esque nail colours as well. Disturbing grey, dark green and navy are a little too goth and ghoulish for me. Time to let them go and pass them on to a gal pal with more edge.

By the way, isn’t it impressive that I didn’t separate the nail polishes into single days? That is how cocky I am feeling with my unloading.

I thought I would enjoy gold glittery toenails. I was wrong. It was very distracting. I am not a glittery toenail kind of girl. It was also an enormous hassle to remove the glitter from my nails afterwards. Nails shouldn’t involve that much elbow grease. I will pass the glitter to a magpie pal who enjoys sparkles.

A friend gave me a half used scented candle because she was getting rid of it. It served me well the time I discovered a rotten potato* in the kitchen (who knew a potato could smell that bad?).  I burned the candle to mask the rotten potato corpse stench, so it did serve it’s purpose at the time. Now the wick is almost buried in wax and the few times I have tried to light it, I burn my fingers. Time for it to go.

*For the record, I am well aware that if I was a minimalist I would probably never have to worry about rotten potatoes. A minimalist wouldn’t have an overabundance of potatoes forgotten and rotting in the bottom of her overstuffed shelf in the kitchen. A minimalist would probably have a single potato sitting primly on the counter waiting to be prepared for the evening’s simple supper.

Is it cheating to say I am getting rid of a dead plant when I know I will be replacing it? I’m not really becoming more minimal if I plan on getting a new plant, but I’m going to count it anyway. A real minimalist may cringe, but my game, my rules.

I have three wooden spoons. Does a minimalist need three wooden spoons? No. A minimalist would have one. Since I am not a full minimalist I will keep two ( for now) but I don’t need three. Even I know that.

I think this is a styling brush to use while blow drying hair. I never blow dry my hair, except when I occasionally wave it around my head for a couple of seconds. Then I get hot and irritated by that whiny sound and give up.

I don’t need this brush. I don’t know why I had it in the first place.

The true point of minimalism, I think, is to strip away all the noise and meaningless clutter to the heart of what really matters. This past weekend did just that. Andrew and I went on a road trip to the beach with great tunes, ice cream, and the dog sticking her snout out the window. We spent the day with our toes in the sand and feeling the sunshine on our faces. We witnessed the dog morph from a fuzzy lamb to a sand monster who bore an uncanny resemblance to Kris Kristofferson.

Love, sunshine, a happy dog and ice cream. You don’t need much more than that.