Bag it!

Happy Friday wherever you are and welcome to blog #17. My target is to blog a couple of times a week about this, and so far so good. This coming Monday will welcome the two month mark of the challenge, and so far, it's been fairly good - I no complain. A few minor ups and downs but nothing that has really spiked the emotional graph too much (haven't had to break out the emergency fund of blue pills). Day ain't over yet, I realise, but we're tracking along quite well, all in all.



Say that again - you're thinking less....Actually, you know what I've noticed? I think about shopping less. I think about acquiring new clothing items less than I used to, only a couple of months ago. I am thinking of other things, that's also true and that helps -- a shift in focus. But it's equally true that my thought patterns around shopping have changed. It's like my scanning mechanism for shopping has been systematically tampered with, just enough, to lower my sensitivity to shopping. Somehow. I'm sure some pure psychomathmatician (that job exists, right?) could generalise a theorem or mathematical proof to prove or disprove the underlying structural elements creating a causal link between desire and discipline. But the bottom line is that shopping is in my thoughts less and less. I don't find myself thinking "oh, might pop into Zambezi for a quick look at what they've got" so much, and I don't find myself in the general vicinity of Zambezi so much either.

Cathartic clean out. I did a mini clean out of my closet the other day. Completely spontaneous. Went in there to put a pair of socks away and ended up feeling the need to review my shoes and tailored shirts and trousers. It was quite cathartic and I ended up giving to the goodwill four bags (pictured above) with the following inside them:

• 10 pairs of shoes. This is the sum total of some people's shoe wardrobe (hi Jenni!), I know. But it represent(ed) about 10% of mine. These shoes were in good nick, but hadn't been worn in over a year
• 14 shirts and tops. Nine of these were tailoured shirts I would wear for work/going out, but they weren't my best, or didn't fit as well as I'd like, or didn't feel completely... right. One of particularly good quality is going to a friend (hi Helen!) as she'll likely get more wear out of it than me. The tops that hit the bag were pilled -- you know those little balls of fabric that congregate under the arms and other high impact areas? That's pilling and these tops had hit their limit
• 5 pairs of tailoured trousers. Mainly bagged because they weren't my best, I didn't feel particularly great wearing them, and they were in a colour I had a lot of (chocolate for instance - I still have 9 pairs of pants somewhere in the 'chocolate' range)

So, that all felt great. I took my haul down to Lifeline so those items will go the Lifeline warehouse and be sorted for distribution around Queensland. That feels good, too. There's more hanging space now - rather than shirts and pants being slightly crammed in together on the rail, there's a bit more room. My shoe rack wasn't crammed but it was full. And now it's a little... less full (gee, I'm articulate today, aren't I?). I'm guessing another purge or two will happen during the coming 10 months.

So that's life as we know it inside the Challenge this week. It feels a little like the white line in the middle of the road for now. Which ain't terribly excitin', but ain't too bad either. Right?