One piece at a time

[dolorosa_12]

I never thought I'd end up becoming the kind of person who gets a rush from decluttering the house, and yet here we are. On Friday, in a fit of frustration, I started going through the house and courtyard and collecting items we haven't used for years, and are unlikely ever to use, and within 48 hours pretty much all of them are gone, or on the way out:

I wheeled Matthias's unused bike, which he acquired secondhand, and which has been sitting, with flat tyres, slowly gathering rust in our garden since about 2013, to the cycle sales/rental place in the park nearby. The owner was happy to take it — he said he'd sell whatever parts were salvagable, and recycle the rest.

I advertised the three university gowns we have (and which are technically the 'wrong' gowns now that we both have PhDs, and have done for years) on postgraduate and undergraduate student Facebook groups for my old department. So far one has been collected, and another has been claimed and will be collected tomorrow. Fingers crossed for the third!

We had two broken plastic garden chairs in our garden which have been sitting there for months. They're too big to fit in the bin, and can't be repaired. On Friday, I suddenly had the brilliant idea to saw them in half. This was the work of a few minutes, and now they're all in the bin.

I got rid of our old plastic garden table (a secondhand gift from a neighbour) on Freecycle yesterday.

Someone else from Freecycle is coming to collect our old vacuum cleaner any minute.

I've found a company that will collect and recycle electronic items for free, and am going to call them tomorrow to take Matthias's two old laptops and another pile of old cables, disused DVD players etc.

I thought this would be a whole lot harder...

It's been a wet, miserable weekend, so mostly I've just been at home, reading. I've read two books.

The first was Jordan Ifueko's Raybearer. This is the first in a new YA series. I'm just going to point you all to schneefink's spoiler-heavy review, because it pretty much says everything I would have said about the book. The one thing I would add is that I figured out most of the plot twists, including the various ways Tarisai managed to wriggle out of fulfilling her ... I want to say geas, except that the book is inspired by West African mythology and geasa are from Irish folklore. I wouldn't say that's a weakness of the book — it's more because I've read a lot of stories that are about unbreakable supernatural vows/obligations, and the ways characters find a way around them.

The second book was The Queen of Nothing, the final book in Holly Black's Folk of the Air YA trilogy. I'd been waiting until this one came down in price for a while, and the wait definitely paid off. I'm not going to pretend these books are groundbreaking YA fiction, but because Holly Black and I most definitely share an id, I always feel like her books have been written as if to my exact specifications. This trilogy does a really, really good job of exploring the implications of the folkloric understanding of fairies: namely, that they are incapable of telling lies. All sorts of things follow on from this: a culture of beings who cannot lie will of course develop expert skills in omission, half-truths, and circumlocution, and they will also find human beings, who can lie, to be absolutely terrifying. Any humans who get caught up in otherworldly fairy politics will, of course, find the fairies absolutely terrifying. I love the series so much, and I hope people write it for Yuletide.

Last night Matthias and I were at a bit of a loss, and so we decided to make some use of our languishing Disney+ subscription, and rewatched Black Panther. It's still not my favourite Marvel film, but I think it's definitely the best quality one, in terms of the screenwriting, cast, design, score, and overall storytelling. Watching it now, after the death of Chadwick Boseman was certainly a bittersweet experience, and I'm quite worried about what plans Marvel has afoot regarding sequels — I think recasting the role would be a very bad idea, but I also think more films about the other characters in this corner of the franchise would be very welcome. Something centring on the women might be good.

Other than that, I've been mostly doing yoga, and braving the rain to collect a free Chelsea bun in celebration of Fitzbillies' (a Cambridge cafe/bakery that's something of an institution) 100th birthday. (And speaking of Instagram, I've had a couple of people add me over there who I suspect are fandom types who know me from Dreamwidth. If that's you, and I haven't added you back, it's because your username doesn't match the one I know from Dreamwidth/Twitter etc -- so let me know who you are, and I'll add you back!)

All in all, a good weekend, if only because I've studiously avoided focusing on anything occurring outside the pages, or the four walls of my own house.

Comments

[bruttimabuoni]

This sounds so productive! I've switched out my summer clothes but otherwise haven't made much good use of the quiet weekend.

[dolorosa_12]

I'm always full of such admiration for people who have completely separate summer and winter wardrobes, and are fastidious about moving things from one to the other when the time is right! All my clothes are in the same place (in different drawers, but that's about as far as it goes), and I think being able to separate them would be a nice (and productive) seasonal marker!

[corvidology]

It sounds like a really good weekend.

I'm desperately working on getting stuff out of our house as well. It's just so easy to let it go and I know I feel better when my stuff is in order.

[dolorosa_12]

It honestly felt like a weight had been lifted when the stuff was out of the door. The bike in particular had been sitting in the garden outside our bedroom window, unused and gathering rust for about six or seven years, and was really depressing to look at. I'm so annoyed with myself that an easy solution for getting rid of it was two minutes' walk away the whole time!

Good luck with your own decluttering.

[schneefink]

I'm glad you enjoyed "Raybearer"!
I nominated it for Yuletide, I hope there will be fic.

Any guesses/expectations/hopes how things will develop in the next book?

[dolorosa_12]

Ooh, let's hope there's fic!

Regarding the next book, given that justice is such a big theme of the first book — genuine justice, which understands that justice is not the same thing as stability — I would assume some kind of large scale revolutionary change that undoes a lot of how their society is currently structured (rather than simply replacing a corrupt and unjust ruler with more moral rulers). I'm hoping that Dayo doesn't become an antagonist, because I found him so refreshing as a character and would prefer him and Tarisai to continue working together.

Also, I'm hoping for more queer characters and a bit more of a focus on the other council members.

[schneefink]

I agree with all of this.

I hope that Dayo won't become an actual antagonist, but I would enjoy him and Tarisai having to resolve political differences between them and learning how to work together as equals who have different ideas sometimes.

[dolorosa_12]

I would enjoy him and Tarisai having to resolve political differences between them and learning how to work together as equals who have different ideas sometimes.

Yes, that's basically what I want too. I want them essentially to have the same aims and motivations, but differ in how they feel would be most effective in achieving those things.

[aimedatthestars]

Oh I bingeread The Folk of Air trilogy a couple months back, after having not read Holly Black since the Darkest Part of the Forest. I really loved it, and hope someone writes how Cardan and Jude learn to be in a Healthy-ish Relationship TM.

[dolorosa_12]

I love the trilogy so much — I think I've loved pretty much everything Holly Black has ever written.

I haven't yet made inroads on the fic for this fandom that exists on AO3, but I can see at a glance that a lot of it is post-canon Cardan/Jude stuff, so you'll probably get your wish!

[merit]

I don't usually get a /thrill/ from YA these days but you're right - Black hits my id as well and I really should get around to finishing the trilogy!

I tend to procrastinate/put off something. Probably spend hours on thinking about something. And then I do it - and it didn't take that long! I have started to get a bit better at this.

[dolorosa_12]

She just writes messed up relationships with power imbalances (that shift between the different characters at different times) so, so well. I definitely felt the trilogy ended in a really satisfying way.

I'm not a procrastinator at all: I'm a start things straight away and do them in small manageable chunks until the thing is finshed kind of person. My husband, however, is a dreadful procrastinator ... hence all this stuff accumulating!

[falena]

You were super productive, go you. Decluttering can be so satisfying, I never knew myself, until I did. :D

[dolorosa_12]

I think what was frustrating me so much is basically we don't live with a lot of disused clutter — generally we only buy what we need and will use. But this handful of stuff had been hanging around the house for years because we were so uncertain about how to get rid of it (it's complicated when you don't have a car).

I remember you saying that you decluttered your wardrobe recently, and that's really something I need to think about doing soon. I've been hanging onto a handful of things that are basically 'aspirational' skirts and jackets — clothing that is now more than fifteen years old, and which I keep in the futile hope that I will lose enough weight to wear them again. Given that this is extremely unlikely to happen (and given that I'm likely to be working from home for at least another three months and am mostly just wearing leggings and heavy winter jumpers all the time as a result), it seems pointless to keep these clothes. They're still in good quality (I tend to buy more expensive clothes, in small quantities, which last a long time, rather than cheaper clothing that wears out in a year or two), so I could donate them to a secondhand shop and someone else might get more use out of them.

[naye]

Glad to hear you're getting rid of things that have been weighing on you for a while! It is a lovely feeling. ♥

[dolorosa_12]

It really is quite freeing! And in the time since I've posted, I've got rid of a bunch of other stuff as well, with a plan to get rid of even more!