GROIC2 – the first few

So, the whole GROIC/minimalist’s game thing went well last month, but I hadn’t finished going through all my junk and some friends decided to re-run the event in November. There are quite a few people signed up with us on facebook, all of them making inroads on their clutter.

I decided I wasn’t going to be as rigorous with the rules this time: I want to get rid of (at least) 1+2+3+…+30 objects (this time a total of at least 465), but I’ve allowed myself to do whatever I like on whatever day I like, and some days can have multiple eliminations, and others can have none. In part this is because I know November is going to be a busier month than October was, especially since it’s marking season and I simply have to get that done, and I have to say that I did find it a little stressful last month trying to plan to get n things organised for day n.

In addition to relaxing the rules, I’m not going to do single blog entries for each number and/or day either, but will account for things in batches.

Here, then, are the first few.

• #1: set-top box (given to the niece who received last month’s day 1 DVD player in the hope that this will let her use it as a television)
• #6: left-over odds and ends from Jamboree (included in the #14 photo at right; this was a total waste of #6, but I was cleaning up other stuff and there were 6 stupid little leftovers at the end, so #6 is where they’re counted)
• #14: piles of paper from various sources (Scouts, Church, overseas trips, conferences, life, the universe, and everything)
• #19: various old artworks I did in high school (I thought they were okay at the time, but they aren’t really!)
• #21: old VHS video tapes
• #30: 68 cassette tapes (usually recordings for the car I’d dubbed from my records and CDs).

I feel bad about #21 and #30 in particular, because I can’t easily see a way to recycle them (despite a couple of reasonable but a little too difficult suggestions from my facebook friends), and they also remind me of music that was once a quite significant part of my life but which I don’t have time to listen to as often. I suspect I will go and download a few from iTunes (at least when that technology becomes redundant, the actual songs I’ve downloaded will just vanish in a puff of electrons).

Post-event note: As it happens, I made it through the month but didn’t blog about it in the way I’d thought I would. There is a conclusion blog entry here, which explains how things finished up.