GROIC Day 1

Okay, I’ve picked up another do-something-a-day challenge.

Given how I haven’t recovered from the last one, this is probably a bad idea.

On the other hand, it involves decluttering my house and getting rid of bits and pieces I’ve been meaning to get rid of for ages, and this is a good idea.

It’s called the Minimalist Challenge, but because I’m not really going with the whole minimalist ethos, I’m just calling it the Get Rid Of It Challenge, or GROIC for short.*

The idea is to use the month of October to eliminate some “stuff” from your life, by getting rid of one thing on October 1, two things on October 2, three things on October 3 and so on. By the end of the month, since 1+2+3+…+31=496, there will be nearly 500 fewer things in your house. This clearly involves some planning — which I haven’t done — or some fall back strategies — which I have thought of, although they smack of desperation (e.g., throwing out 31 individual bits of paper … or even tearing up one bit of paper into 31 pieces).

Anyway, here is day 1: a portable DVD player. I used this little DVD player in my bedroom in Melbourne, as it had an input so I could use a video recorder to turn it into a television as well. When I moved to Tasmania I did the rather non-minimalist thing of getting a bigger television for my bedroom and as it had a built in DVD player, the old portable one is surplus to requirements and so it is going. I am getting rid of it by giving it to my eldest niece. I’m not sure her mother will appreciate the transfer of clutter, but there you go. (You may be aware that some aspects of my cluttered life are quite well organised … which means that I was able to find the instruction manual!)

* I’m still too brain-dead from the 100 poems challenge to come up with a better acronym.