Once Upon a Fic Exchange

This has been an extremely efficient weekend, on various domestic fronts.

When Matthias's father was visiting a couple of weeks ago, he brought multiple large boxes of Matthias's old stuff — books in English and German, magazines, school exercise books, DVDs, VHS cassettes and CDs — the sort of childhood ephemera that gathers and lingers in the parental home if one is an immigrant who has lived one's entire adult life outside the country of origin. I remember boxing all this stuff up about a decade ago and storing it in the box room at Matthias's parents' place, and there it's remained, even though the house is now owned by Matthias's sister, who lives there with her husband and their three kids. The last boxes of my own equivalent stuff arrived by mail two years ago — mainly my childhood and teenage books — so it was high time to deal with Matthias's belongings.

He's already been through the English-language books, shelved the stuff he wanted to keep, and weeded out the stuff to go (including duplicates of books I already owned). We put the unwanted books out on the street, and people have already taken most of them. Every time I've put books out on the street, everything goes eventually, and I'm pretty certain that will happen in this case as well.

(On top of that, we're transitioning in Ely in June to a new rubbish/recycling regime which means we no longer need the big black bin bags for non-recyclable rubbish. We hardly ever have rubbish to collect, so we tend to accumulate far more of these bags than we could ever possibly need. We periodically put rolls of the bags out in the street for others to take, and on Friday I put out the last handful, along with some clean, unwanted sturdy paper shopping bags — and they all went as well.)

We're a bit hampered with rubbish by the fact that we don't drive or have a car, so I was slightly concerned about all the VHS cassettes (which Matthias didn't want to keep), but we figured out that the recycling centre in Witchford would take them, and that this was an easy half-hour walk through public byways in the fields, so this morning, after breakfast, we each filled a backpack with VHS cassettes, plus some batteries that we also couldn't get rid of anywhere else, and walked them over to the tip. As we were on foot, we didn't have to wait our turn in the huge, backed-up queue of cars waiting for a slot, and were in and out, and back home within a hour of leaving.

We cleared out the big living room cupboard (where I'd shoved a bunch of appliance boxes when we moved in and never looked at them again), and moved them up into the loft. And now I can see Matthias going through the boxes of old newspapers and magazines, so those will be dealt with by the end of the weekend too.

In the garden, we constructed a covered archway over one of the vegetable beds to protect the seeds and seedlings, as we have enormous problems with blackbirds — as soon as we plant anything, they come and dig it up and eat it, and hurl mulch all over the footpath, and I'm sick of it! I also planted out some cucumber, parsley, dill and chard seedlings, planted amaranth, sunflowers and radishes, and scattered a few more packets of wildflower seeds around. After I've finished this post, I'm going to tie the self-seeded sweetpea plants to stakes, and that will be the garden tasks done for now. We're doing well when it comes to herbs and salad greens — and indeed ate home-grown mixed greens and chives in a salad for lunch today.

There's also been a lot of cooking, pickling and fermenting going on: stewed apples with cinnamon, plus cooked strawberries, to go with our breakfasts next week, sauerkraut (with cabbage, cucumber and fennel, plus caraway seeds), a jar of homemade pickles, and another jar of shatta (fermented chili condiment).

That's plus two hours of classes in the gym yesterday, and 1km swimmming on Friday and again this morning, and some decent, lengthy yoga classes at home.

I'd say all that feels pretty decent, and the decluttering in particular is extremely satisfying. I'm really glad we got all that done so efficiently (although in some ways it would have been better to have discarded all the stuff we gave away/recycled/threw away ten years ago in Germany, but given I behaved in a similar way with my own belongings in Australia, I find the extended hanging on to stuff that eventually just gets binned entirely understandable).

As a consequence, I have not had much time for reading or other media, although I did watch Send Help (a comedic thriller in which an overworked and underappreciated corporate office worker ends up stranded on a tropical island with her childish and unappreciative boss, where her hitherto unrecognised side hobby of outdoor survival in extreme landscapes of course comes in incredibly handy, with predictable results) last night. Hopefully next weekend will have a bit more time for proper relaxing, but I'm happy to have been able to devote so much of this weekend to getting all this stuff done so efficiently.