Back when it was beginning to get cold last fall, I became somewhat obsessed with The Trials of Van Occupanther by Midlake. It has the most perfectly northernly winter-ish sound to it, and I listened to it for a week of mornings on the bus before I eventually got around to making out the lyrics (for some reason, this tends to take me a while).

When I did, the song “Bandits” really stood out to me.

Did you ever want to be overrun by bandits;
to hand over all of your things and start over new?
While we were out hunting for food
our house was being robbed.
I caught an apple and she caught a fox,
so I caught a rabbit but she caught an ox.

So upon our return, we found everything gone
which for us was no loss
and we started over
with a rabbit and an ox.

My brother left a comment on the last post that there have been ”times when I’ve secretly hoped that my apartment would burn down.” While I do not at all mean to downplay the suffering of losing all your possessions in a fire or tornado or hurricane, I know exactly what he means. When it comes to getting rid of things, I think that we would all prefer a clean sweep — like pulling a bandaid off quickly — to slow and painful sorting and decision-making. (For another look at this issue, see this excellent article by a former high school classmate.)

The problem we encounter, however, is that it generally doesn’t happen that way. There is rarely a quick fix to the amount of belongings we have accumulated: we have to open all the cupboards and closets, pull out dusty boxes, unpack the contents of crowded shelves, and choose what to keep vs. what to give away. This is such an upleasant prospect that I, for one, tend to put it off until some majorly stressful event like moving leaves me with no other choice. And we don’t even own a house, so the magnitude of our problem is a lot less than that of someone who’s been living in the same place for twenty or thirty years. (For example, I think it’s fair to say that several members of my family dread the day that my grandfather’s house comes into our possession because it is just so full of stuff. And all of it has a story and a sentimental reason to be kept, and it’s going to be a very emotional ordeal to sort through everything.)

In contemplating my desire to accumulate and the reasons why I think that I need everything I have, it’s way too easy to blame it all on advertising. I mean, it works — hey, that’s a photo of a fabulous CB2 vase that I never knew I needed! – but it’s certainly not the sum of the problem.

In my life, I think that I bring a lot of this attitude upon myself because of my ongoing obsession with design blogs. I spend way too much time looking around and planning out my next apartment purchases, even if they never actually end up happening. I love checking Apartment Therapy multiple times a day because I know that every time I do I’ll get new eye candy. Sometimes I come away with cleaning or organizing tips, but more often than not I just want something…something nicer than, or in addition to, what I’ve already got.

And if the blog world doesn’t do it to you, how about your favorite magazines? I think that Martha Stewart must own four or five large warehouses full of antiques PLUS all of their proper antique-y storage devices. Sheesh, the lady doesn’t just collect pretty pillowcases: she has stack after stack of Irish linens that have been perfectly pressed and stored on their own wooden hanging racks in the attic of one of her houses that is regularly aired out for freshness and exposed to just the right amount of sun. It’s probably a little unfair to start making fun of Martha’s foibles since a) it’s easy and b) I do enjoy quite a lot of what she does, but yikes! Have you ever really contemplated the kind of maximalism (not to mention perfectionism) that she endorses? Who can live up to that?!

In the end, I always end up at the tension between diagnosing my problem and actually doing something about it. It’s easy to say that I own too many dishes or read too many blogs and much harder to take that extra step of doing something about it. (Or not doing something that I enjoy and don’t want to give up.) I don’t want to stop reading my favorite set of blogs because I don’t want to fall behind — as though I’m so fashion-forward! — and lose touch with what’s en vogue in the world of furniture design. Stating this makes me feel kind of ridiculous, but it’s true.

So…

What to do?

What do you do?

Are there any examples you’ve seen of acheiving a nice balance in this area? Of keeping enough things to fill and decorate a simple little apartment, but successfully saying “this much and no more” and sticking with it?

If so, please share!

Due to a computer swap and an unexpected Outlook glitch, I found 396 unread emails waiting for me when I sat down at my desk yesterday morning. In one account.

(It turned out that at least 300 of them were duplicates of old emails — each of which had to be carefully, individually weeded out — but then I discovered another 70 or so in a separate file. Oh, and then there were the 78 in the other account.)

Not my idea of a “welcome back” present.

Enough about work, though…I’m sure you’re dying to hear all about the moving sale. (Right?) Well, it was Big. Since I spent most of my time running around with a distracted look on my face, I neglected to take any photos of the absolutely enormous quantities of stuff that we sold. So suffice it to say that we filled up our kitchen counters, some cabinets, two bookshelves, a desk, a table, a couch, and a lot of other miscellaneous shelving with sale items. And, quite to our surprise, most of them sold.

We like to think that our friends got most of the good bargains and that our dishes and toaster and blender and ottoman will be quite serviceable to someone else for years to come. I view this part of the sale as being successful in that needed items were redistributed from people who can’t use them anymore (=us) to people who can.

In other ways, though, I found our moving sale to be kind of disturbing. It was a little shocking to line up all of our possessions and find out how many of them we didn’t actually need. As husband mentioned to me later, we accumulated an awful lot of goods in order to meet what we projected that our needs were going to be, not what we actually found that they were. The wedding registry is a classic example of this — we registered for a number of kitchen gadgets and towels and whatnot that seemed so essential at the time and yet turned out to be just a bunch of stuff to fill up the cupboards. And my registry was a lot smaller than some of the others that I’ve seen!

As I was ferrying boxes back and forth, I spent some time listening to NPR’s coverage of the cyclone in Burma and the earthquake in China. And as I thought about the people who had just lost everything, I felt very disgusted with my desire to accumulate: I have spent so much money on what is unnecessary, even within the context of our affluent sociey.

Back when we were initially tallying up our moving expenses, I worried that we wouldn’t have enough money to re-purchase all of the things that we were selling after we move to Florida. Now, however, we are wondering if a lot of these things actually need to be replaced. A lot of the furniture will be, for sure (bed, couch, dresser? I think those are pretty important) but a lot of the do-dahs and decorations and dishes just aren’t necessary. We packed only the four stovetop pans that we really use and sold all but one set of dishes. The new goal: to not immediately buy back all the rest.

I have more thoughts about this issue and would really like to hear what you all think as well. How much is too much? How do you justify a lot of your belongings when you know that other people own far less? What things have you gotten rid of that you later missed, and what have you kept that is completely unnecessary? I think that there’s good grounds for discussion here, especially since it ought be more than hypothetical and involve some actions in the end.

But for now, I live you with my favorite quote by William Morris: Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful. 

What do you think?

Spending all of yesterday digging through piles of old insurance bills and artwork didn’t improve my mood a whole lot, but things are beginning to perk up today. Most of the wall decor in the apartment has come down, which is a sure sign that Something is Happening. We have also started pricing various items and it is a bit odd to look at the familiar dining room lamp and find it labeled “$10.”

Speaking of labeling, the number of round orange sticky notes has been escalating to the point where I wonder how we are going to display everything that’s for sale. For you, local readers, this is a good thing: Do you need champagne glasses? a leather office chair? a tv? ironing board? vases? We got ‘em. And because we know that some of you don’t enjoy getting up early to go yard sale-ing on Saturday mornings, we are even providing you with a special, Friends-of-the-Gibbses Preview Sale. (If you’re reading this, you qualify.)

The nitty gritty is:

Preview Sale: this Friday, 8:30-10:00 or so PM
Yard Sale: Saturday, 8:00 AM - noon
For Sale: various pieces of furniture (couch, table and chairs, cabinet, low credenza, side tables, desk and hutch, nice office chair, misc shelves, etc.); dishes (set of Ikea dishes, set of vintage dishes, lots of assorted coffee and tea cups, glasses, etc.); kitchen wares (nice Cuisinart pots and pans, blender, toaster, toaster over, microwave, serving utensils, etc.); linens (new and vintage placemats, tablecloths, etc.); wall art (various posters and prints, including some of my own work and a couple of prints by Emily of The Black Apple); books; records; cds; and tons of stuff that I am forgetting.

Oh, and I am also clearing some fabric, notions, vintage patterns, and art supplies out of my craft room. And I am getting rid of some sample prints — including the first run of alphabirdybet letters — from my shop, as well as nice prints of older art school work and a pile of hand-developed photographs.

Sound like fun? Please help spread the word (Facebook invite, anyone?) and stop by on Friday or Saturday! Even if you don’t buy anything, it will be fun to survey our ridiculous amount of stuff and say hello. :)

I try not to blog about work very often since it’s all-too-often going to be a complaint or a story that ought not be made public. So I didn’t say anything about my glorious last seminar EVER last Wednesday and how I managed not to mess up the speaker’s schedule or the A/V equipment. (This was in fact a high point of this semester’s seminar series, as (a) all manner of scheduling problems have arisen with recent speakers, and (b) I have have consistently dealt with projector and laptop problems, which result in 60 people staring at me and pondering my incompetance as I fumble with various cords. Not fun.)

Today, however, I am unable to think about anything besides my job and am going to go ahead and write a bit about it because a lot of you readers are my friends and I would really appreciate a little moral support right now.

Most days of the week I dread coming in to the office and spend the bus ride thinking about all the things I need to accomplish and how many of them can go wrong. Now, I generally manage to avoid most of the unpleasant fruits of the imagination (like that meeting with your boss that you are sure is going to be horrible and then turns out to be pretty good in the end). Lately, however, this hasn’t been the case, and the correlation between “that which I am dreading” and “that which actually happens” has been unusually high, which is causing me to lose faith in the it’s not going to be that bad philosophy.

Take this morning, for instance. Yesterday afternoon, one of my “bosses” (whom I really, really like) asked me to call a last-minute meeting of an important committee. Five minutes after I cheerfully sent the email, I started to think about what he wanted to talk about. And I became convinced that he was going to announce his resignation.

I spent all of yesterday evening and all of this morning pondering this possibility.

And then he did.

To clarify, I am not upset at the decision itself. He is a very overworked and overstressed man, and I had been wondering for a while how he managed to keep going. The particular job in question is purely voluntary and waaaayyyy more than any sane person can fill while managing a productive, fully-funded research program. I am very happy that he doesn’t have to do this any more.

Quite selfishly, however, I am upset that I am losing someone who was kind, personable, and easy to work with, as I doubt that his replacement will share all of these characteristics (this person is TBD, by the way, so I am not referring to anyone in particular). It sounds cheesy, but he was my friend as well as my boss and I will miss seeing him every day. I am also faced with the situation of needing to pass along large quantities of information to this new person and my yet-to-be-hired replacement at the same time as I help plan and manage an international conference, finish all manner of program-related projects, overhaul a large website, and write a fairly complete manual for How To Do My Job before I wave goodbye on July 25. Just thinking about it makes me kind of nauseated.

So I am hoping that, given these circumstances, you will forgive me for not coming up with exciting blogging topics, new photos, or new art for the ol’ Etsy shop. I simply don’t know how to do it all.

(If you would, please pray that we can sucker convince someone else to fill the position that is being vacated as soon as possible. Otherwise, either I or our rather unwieldy committee will need to pick up a lot of slack, and I don’t think that the results will be pretty.)

I finished my photo-sorting project last night. Well, the wedding photos are still left to do, but those are far fewer and can be dealt with later.

As I look at these (very grainy) photos, it doesn’t seem as though I downsized all that much.

It’s hard to communicate just how dense everything is — each of those little tiny books contains, like, 60 photos. And then there are the big ones, the medium ones, and my two half-hearted attempts at scrapbooking.

All of which has been reduced to this.

So let me assure you that I sorted and selected and threw a lot of photos away. The orange box is full of negatives, since they don’t take up all that much space and I can’t bear to part permanently with some things just yet. But even so, my photo collection has gone on a major, major diet.

Ahhh.

Now on to the rest of the apartment.

(The cabinet above is a sneak preview of our moving sale, which will be next Saturday, May 17. It’s, like, 10% of the kitchen/random decor items that we’ll be getting rid of, so if you’re in the market for some stuff be sure to drop by! We’re having a special preview sale at our place on Friday night at 8:30 pm, for those who want first pickings…)

This post on Apartment Therapy is worth reading.

Also, on a completely unrelated note, a coworker kindly informed me that the remaining Ren Fair posters are available at (where else) Tie Dye Everything. So if you’ve emailed or left a comment wondering if you can get one and I told you that you can’t, I was wrong…just toodle down to Main Street and pick one up for free.

In the absence of art/craft productivity, I have spent a little time poking around Etsy to find ways to empty my PayPal account (a difficult task, I know). In doing so, I came across an oil painter named Andrea Coats with a lovely little painting blog and an even lovelier shop. Andrea’s gorgeous little paintings are oh-so-affordable…I am planning to buy a small set (2? 3?) for the new kitchen after we move. Some of my favorites are below. Aren’t they gorgeous?!?

(All images by Andrea Coats, used with permission)

I should also mention, in the spirit of sharing, that I found another new-to-me shop selling Marimekko’s Unikko Lac print in blue for only $15/yard. It normally retails for something around $40/yard, so this is a really good deal. And seeing as this is the exact print, color, and size that I’ve been looking for, I bought two yards and can tell you that it is quite lovely in person. I plan to put it in the yet-unseen dining room of our yet-unrented apartment, so I hope that nothing in it clashes with blue. :)

Finally (and this did deplete the PayPal account), I am happy to announce that I am the proud owner of my very own piece of Amy Ruppel’s encaustic art. I have loved her work ever since I first saw it online and decided during her recent online art sale that now is the time. I mean, there will never be a “good” time to spend money on art — which is so easily viewed as non-essential — unless you make it. So I made it. And now these little birdies will be flying to me soon.

(Image by Amy Ruppel)

I turned out that someone purchased the piece I wanted, but Amy very kindly made me a new one. So perfect, isn’t it?

Husband doesn’t know about this yet, so I guess this is my way of seeing if he checks the old blog. ;)

Probably not so much posting this week (or next), as I am busy packing and working on this. After all the very helpful comments you left me on my what-to-do post, a 2nd shop seemed like the very best option. Paulabirdy will remain open and have all the birdy-themed items, while PaulaGibbs will carry the Day at the Beach prints, some new gocco prints, and a few other things.

Already done:

• create new email address
• create new shop
• create new banner and temporary avatar
• order new prints (they came!)
• take photos of prints
• design rough draft of business cards

Still to do:

• order new business cards
• come up with a new promotional postcard or freebie
• edit and resize photos for Etsy listings
• create new listings
• finish writing shop announcement, email to buyers, etc.
• make a few changes to the Paulabirdy shop
• fiddle with PayPal settings
• come up with a new packaging scheme (i.e. not ribbon)

Sound like fun? If you’re thinking about opening a shop, it’s a good idea to make a pretty complete to-do list first…I’m sure I’m still missing some things, but my current list is already long enough to banish thoughts of finishing everything in a week. :)

Given the current state of my apartment (=chaos) and schedule (=hectic), I’m putting the Monday moving sales on hold for a few weeks. I want to start adding old drawings and paintings next, and at the moment I’m not even sure where they are. I am hoping to unearth a little pile of sale-able art in the near future so I can resume the sales!

I made the hundredth sale in my Etsy shop yesterday and I noticed that Lauren did the same. I wasn’t sure that this would ever happen, so I’m pretty happy/relieved. Congrats to Lauren and my hundredth buyer, who will – of course – receive an extra gift. :)

This has been a rather scattered Friday so I don’t have enough time for the post I had planned. Instead, I think I will scheme (and sort photos) over the weekend and see if I can have something nice to show you on Monday. A new set of prints arrived today, which means that I also need to find time to snap a batch of photos. Oh, and I can’t forget to visit the Sing and Shout Crafts booth at the Moscow Farmer’s Market: I opted out this year, but it sounds as though the selection will be better than ever. Make sure to stop by and say hello to the Sing ’n’ Shout girls if you’re downtown on Saturday!

I realized that I’ve neglected to post photos of the Spring Gala last weekend. It was really fun! To sum it up, a friend of ours decided to turn his house into an art gallery for two days and invite a bunch of local authors and bands to perform. Husband gave a really excellent short story reading, and I was very impressed by my friends’ musical prowess.

Have a good weekend, all!

(Oil paintings by Nate Stevenson)

(My gouache paintings and gocco)

Hello, my name is Paula and I am a photoholic.

This would (perhaps) not be such a bad problem if it didn’t involve heaps and heaps of photos. I mean, it’s not like it’s particularly bad for me — or you — or that it’s an addiction that can’t be broken: I have smoothly made the transition from film to digital, although I do mourn for my old Nikon sometimes. Nope, the main problem is that my years of photo-taking have generated this. And this simply cannot be shipped in its entirety to Pensacola.

I apologize that the photo is lousy and that it doesn’t do justice to the mismatched towers of books, albums, boxes, photos and negatives piled on my dining room table. The stacks are quite high, and this is compounded by the problem that they are also quite dense — each album is chock full of memories, and I am now trying to decide which of those memories I don’t need to hang onto anymore.

Initially, I found this problem to be quite upsetting. Without my photos, how will I ever remember all these things? It will be as if they never happened! Once I got over the big lump in my throat and sat down to business, however, I realized that it’s not quite as bad as that. Sure, I will toss some images of mystery cities and cathedrals, but they aren’t really necessary to preserve forever, anyway — I think that I kept those photos out of a clutching, I-don’t-want-to-forget-any-part-of-that-time-in-my-life sentiment. This is not a particularly good sentiment to encourage, since there are plenty of times in my life that I don’t need or want to wallow in again. I mean, if you get wade through a swamp and find a lovely meadow on the other side, why bring complete documentation of the swamp with you?

Instead of keeping a photo of everything, then, I am trying to keep just the good ones. And by good I don’t just mean artistic, since I have come to the humbling realization that I am rather a worse photographer than I had thought (there are some really ugly pics in those stacks!). No, I mean the photos that show smiling faces and happy family birthday parties and cousins splashing in the lake. Some of these are pretty, and some are kind of grainy and off-kilter. But when I look at them, I remember that my life has been good and the God has blessed me very much.

I have provided myself with the incentive of four (okay, maybe five) shiny new albums to fill. But no more than that, since photos are really quite heavy.

Now I just need to condense this mess into four (or five) albums.

Wish me luck.