Too many clothes, too little to wear

Re-inventing myself as I approach my 70's also means re-inventing my wardrobe.

Like so many, I have way too many clothes and too little to wear. Blogs about how to whittle down and edit a wardrobe so that it suits you are all over the web, but so many of them are aimed at younger women.

What I need to do now . . . and have been doing over the last several months . . . is just get rid of enough stuff so that I can see what I have.

I know it is a lot. Despite sending at least a dozen giant bags of discarded clothing to the local charities which sell or  recycle used clothes and perhaps another four or so bags straight to the trash, I still have clothing jammed into my armoire, shoved into boxes and old suitcases under the bed, in cartons in the attic and in TWO dressers in the bedroom.

It is just about time to exchange the Summer clothing in the armoire and dressers for the Winter clothing under the bed and in the attic. I am going to make one simple commitment to myself: to have at least one more giant bag off to the recyclers by the time I finish the exchange.

I know where I am going to start, too. For about three weeks in the Spring and another three in the Fall, the most comfortable way of dressing for the temperatures is a light t-shirt, or if it is a little cooler a turtleneck, under a button-down shirt. With decent jeans or good slacks and a simple accessory, this looks adequately put-together for my stay-at-home life and gets me in and out of the grocery store without embarrassment.

The problem? Jammed into my armoire are enough button-down shirts that I could wear a different one every day for a month and still have some left over. In fact, there are probably almost enough that I could wear a different one on each of those Spring and Fall days for the rest of my foreseeable life.

Time to haul them all out and pick a reasonable handful of the favourites.

A Blog of Her Own

I hadn't intended this blog to be so much about blogging.

But I have needed to spend a lot of time just figuring out the mechanics of blogging.

Yes, I jumped in at the deep end, starting my first blog and the Nester's 31-day writing challenge on the very same day.

It's been good fun and I have learnt a lot, but I haven't been able to spend as much time on my re-invention, let alone write about it. And that was the intention.

From now on, I will only write about the mechanics of blogging on Saturdays, when I will write about what I did to the blog in the past week, trying to provide useful links on how I managed each step.

The big change for today is that I added an "about me" page -- very basic, like everything on this blog. It's over there in the top-right. Doing that, this blog was very helpful. It is a bit outdated as it refers to the old dashboard, but it gave me the information I needed to understand these directions for the new dashboard.

Time to stop flying by the seat of my pants?

Thinking about what I wrote yesterday, I began to realize that a whole lot of the reason why I feel I am drifting through my life is that my old ways of managing my time just don't work very well.

Part of it is just being older. While I used to be able to keep multiple task lists more or less in my head and get most of them done, that just doesn't happen anymore. And I did that while living with two people who had to have very erratic schedules, so having much of a routine was never really possible or desirable.

But that's different now. One is retired and the other is only here three or four days of the week. So: still some chaos, but much more controlled.

The ever-evolving goals evolve again.

I need to learn how to work with routines, to figure out how to sort out priorities, and how to create and stick with schedules.

Definitely time to stop flying by the seat of my pants!

Getting Started

Two days ago, I started out with a list of very general objectives that I saw as being part of getting to seventy.

If I am to make any headway on these, I need to sort out where I am now and also figure out more precisely where I want to be in January.

Yesterday, I got more than a bit sidetracked by the mechanics of setting up a blog.That is going to be the case for a while longer.

But even so, and even without getting too specific about my objectives, I feel I have made a few baby steps towards one of them (which was to write more) and a much bigger step towards a more confident me.

Hey, I figured out a whole lot of stuff yesterday without resorting to the household geeks!

Back to those objectives.

One was to write more.

Over the years, I have intermittently kept a journal and I have also done a lot of writing for a couple of volunteer organizations. So writing isn't something I don't do, but I want to make more of it.

I want, most days, to write at least a short journal entry, and, of course, I have made the commitment to write here.

What worries me, though, is that I have gotten slack about the volunteer writing, too often missing deadlines or having to turn in sloppy work to meet them.It's true: some of the writing is not very creative -- things like minutes of meetings -- but some is quite rewarding.

So, what is the problem? What is the solution?

I'll be thinking about this over the next day and writing about it in the morning. But what do you think? I'd love you to comment.

I'm not there yet.

In a little over three months, I will be seventy. I want to be ready.

I want to be healthier.

I want to do my volunteer work more effectively.

I want to live in a cleaner, less cluttered house.

I want to dress better.

I want to read and write more.


I want to re-invent myself.

Can I do these things over the next months? I have never been very good at setting and meeting goals, being more of a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants sort of person.

But I have been toying with the idea of a blog for months now. Perhaps a blog could give me the accountability to myself and the discipline I need.

Thinking about a blog of my own led me to searching the web for one that looked at some of the same issues I face at this age. I found none.

But I did find the Nester's 31 Days Challenge. So a little late, I am creating a blog and signing up. If nothing else, it will lead me to meet one of my objectives: to write a little every day.