Day 6: Special burger bag

I had the rare treat of a lunchtime with just my 18 year old son today.

He's still at home, waiting to start an acting course at college, while the younger two kids are back at school and my husband had his first couple of days back in the office since our first Covid lockdown in March 2020.

I wanted to make it a special occasion with him. When he was in a show a few years ago I used to take him out for burgers (his favourite food) in between shows and rehearsals, to celebrate the opening and closing nights, and other special occasions - so many happy memories.

So I took him out to get fancy burgers from a place on the High Street. They were incredible. One of them was called Toploader and one was called Carnage, and here's the fabulously grease stained paper bag that we took them home in - good thick paper with strong handles for carrying the most substantial burgers, and not at all a metaphor for parenthood 🙄😁.

I'm so lucky that my son's college place means I'll have him around for a couple more years.

But the paper bag is off to the recycling 🙂🌻

Day 5: Charity junk mail from Amnesty

Today's discard is a piece of junk mail from Amnesty.

I don't think they've sent it to me in particular: it hasn't got my name on.

Many addresses ago, I used to donate to Amnesty. Then they sent me a yellow envelope full of photos of dead people, with the cheery message 'Your holiday photos are inside'.

I haven't donated to them since then, and I don't really want to get back in touch with them now either. It's not as if there's a shortage of charities to donate to after all.

After checking through the letter for any personal details to shred, I thought I could use the white envelope, either for lists or with an address label.

The rest could be recycled, and it was good to read that there's no need to tear the window out of window envelopes.^*

^*Unfortunately the first advice I read was wrong: according to Zero Waste Scotland, you do have to tear the windows out before recycling envelopes: https://wasteless.zerowastescotland.org.uk/articles/what-to-do-with-paper.

So I've just got that wrong, but at least it was only one of them.

I looked up paper recycling on this handy website: https://www.recyclenow.com/ but then was happy to discover there was a paper recycling point in my closest collection area, that I hadn't even noticed before:

Strangely, it seems that while the letters go into the paper recycling, the envelopes go separately into the mixed packaging recycling containers, along with the cardboard and tin cans.

Here are the instructions for the paper recycling:

And here are the instructions for the mixed / packaging recycling (mostly readable):

UPDATE: I went back there this morning with my pizza boxes to see if I could tear the window out of that envelope, but it's long gone, buried under loads of other stuff. Hopefully I haven't destroyed the planet with that now, and if I have, well, sorry.

Still, it's good to find this so near my house, and I know I'll have plenty more paper I can come back with. I'll make a page about my local recycling later.

Day 4: Unthinkably stale Chocolate Hobnobs

I know, it's unthinkably bizarre that chocolate biscuits could be left to go stale, but I can only think it's because we've just come back from a week and a half away. Even my teenage son wouldn't eat them.

I also suspect that if I hadn't put them in the tin, I wouldn't have forgotten them. That'll be that 'object permanence'. And possibly I hadn't told the kids they were there, due to them being my favourite biscuit.
Shame. Or accidental dieting, depending on perspective😁.

In any case, it's off to the bin with them. No food scraps bin, so just the regular one.

Day 3: Youngest son's holey socks

It seems like only a few weeks since I bought him a pack of these socks in different colours, and he's gone through the big toes of nearly every pair already.

I checked his toenails in the night but they didn't seem that bad, so perhaps he's been growing again.

In the old days I expect they would have darned this sort of thing, but I'd only even consider that as a novelty for worn out favourite socks of my own: what's the point if he's grown out of them anyway?

If I had room to collect a lot of craft materials, they might have uses for that: perhaps for stuffing cushions, decorating or patching things.

The trouble is, I don't have room for all the worn out things I think I could use to make other things, and it's a shame because I think it could be fun.

I don't know of a way to recycle these locally. I once lived near a collection point for fabric recycling and that was great for this sort of thing: holey socks, stained baby grows, grotty T-shirts, etc.

But everywhere else I know of only collects clothes in resalable or wearable condition, and holey socks won't do for that.

So off to the bin they go.

Day 2: Chives

  This post is exciting (to me) for two reasons:

1. It's my first go at posting by email, and I think it's not a bad option: pictures are a bit small and the formatting needs a bit of tidying up, but otherwise not bad at all and would be fine for a simple post.
   
   
2. I'm sure most people my age have had the experience of finding long-past-their-sell-by-date foods in an older relative's cupboards... Well, here's the evidence that I've reached that point myself: chives that went out of date over a year ago and smell more like hay, if anything.
   

Actually, rethinking that, not sure that second reason is exciting after all.

If I had compost, I could put them in that, but I don't. But to be at least slightly greener, I'll tip them out, throw the plastic lid away and put the glass jar in the recycling.

So it's goodbye, out of date chives, and if I make potato salad again I'll probably use spring onions instead.

Here's the jar, ready to go out to the recycling on the High Street:


And here it is, actually going into that recycling:


Important to note now:

1. I don't plan to document this in so much detail every time, and
2. I'll be really creeped out if that's back on my shelf in the morning...

Day 1: a bag of children's clothes

Hello, and welcome to the first post in my blog about getting rid of my stuff, with the hopes that it might not come back if I say goodbye to it properly.

I actually donated this on Friday 20th August but it's taken me a couple of days to get round to setting the blog up. But hopefully now this is getting it off to a good start, and long may it continue.

The first thing to go was this bag of children's clothes and shoes (can I count this as extra things for when I miss a day?😁).

I've often been too sentimental about going through the kids' things and letting them go: so often, the things that have special meanings for them and for me aren't the same.

So I usually ask them to go through their rooms (often with my husband, who seems not to care about seeing the things go at all), and then I weed out anything I'd be too sorry to miss.

Then at some later point I go through those things, and sometimes wonder what I was thinking.

The bag itself was sent through the post by a charity, along with a note of their collection date and time, but they didn't come to collect it.

Perhaps it's because our front door isn't on the road. It's on the other side of the house, facing onto a square with a footpath, grass and a laundry area.

Here's a photo of the view from our front door:

View from my front door in balmy Scotland. Also my awesome luminous fluffy sandals.

Possibly not very easy to collect from, or just not possible to see the bags from the road?

Anyway, it sat in our house for a couple of months, in the way of the airing rack where I dry the laundry, and eventually one day I got round to taking it all the way around the corner to a charity shop. Not the same charity, but the nearest one, and one of the few that are taking donations without appointments at the moment.

Thankfully, they were happy to take the bag, and I am already so thankful for the space it's left that I'm planning to make a new habit of this. They gave me a card with a bar code to use for Gift Aid on future donations too, and hopefully I will be using that again soon.

Thank you, Chest, Heart and Stroke shop!