Bed

As a teenager I was one of those people who could happily sleep until 10 or 11 in the morning, or even until noon.  A total night of uninterrupted deep sleep.  In those years my favourite way to read was on the bed on my stomach, propped up on my elbows with the book in front of me.

This continued into my twenties and thirties and forties.  The problem was that is was a deep sleep and very difficult to wake up from.  My alarm would go off and it felt like the idea of moving and getting out of bed was almost beyond my capability.  I remember one period of my life where I had two alarms set, one across the room that would keep up an awful buzzing sound until I got up and shut it off.  Even then I could listen to it for a long time before I could convince myself to move.

Getting up got much easier as I aged.  I might take a bit of time to get up and moving but I did it without a lot of fussing and moaning.

Now that I'm old I'm again finding it really difficult to get moving in the morning.  I can lie comfortably for a couple of hours thinking I should get up but just feeling unwilling to make the effort to move.  Often what finally gets me moving is the need to use the bathroom.  My bed is without doubt my favourite  place in my home.  I read there,  I watch TV there.  I sometimes eat there while watching TV.  I do my email there.

Interior Design

 

I like looking at design magazines.  Mainly I'm looking at the floor plans of the homes and the placement of windows, patios and such.  To a degree the layout of furniture.  Lowest on my interest list are the colours, draperies and decorations.  (Although I occasionally see a room that I think is really lovely.). But what always comes to mind when I see a room filled with elaborate light fixtures and paintings and art and objects dumped everywhere is that these designers and not people who have to do their own vacuuming and dusting.

Use Again

 

Recently I bought some dumplings for lunch and the bottom part of the container was a nice oval plastic dish.  I always hate to discard things like that - I start wondering if I could make use of it somehow, perhaps as a serving dish for snacks or candy.  That line of thought of course took me back to my days as a student when I had my first apartment.  It was furnished with hand me downs from my family and friends, including an easy chair and shelves that a friend had rescued from someone's garbage.  

I think I was just as happy, or happier, with all those things than with anything "better" and "brand new" that I have had since.

Even before my formal self-identification as a minimalist I liked "making do" and "repurposing".  Not wasting or spending unnecessarily was something I learned growing up.  My mother's "good" dishes were actually a set that she had collected piece by piece as a gas station giveaway.  That was something that was still happening in the 1960's - my first set of dishes in my apartment were another gas station giveaway. 

I remember jam and peanut butter coming in drinking glasses.  Or people just used jam jars as glasses.  I remember towels and face cloths coming as giveaways in boxes of laundry soap.

I think nowadays with IKEA and Dollarama and such stores it's easy and inexpensive just to go and buy what you need.  No point looking for discards from family.  No need to reuse and repurpose.

In my days of major downsizing twenty-five years ago it was the more expensive and "good" things that I usually chose to remove.  It was the basic, functional things that I tended to keep, many of them from my days in that first apartment.