Money vs Hoarding

I've been dealing with a "pack-rat" syndrome most of the time I've been living in Illinois. It became a particular problem after I got married. Even worse after I quit my job. When I started staying home even though we were saving hundreds of dollars by not having to pay for daycare we suddenly lost over half our income. Neither my husband nor myself knew how to handle money when that much was taken away. It made us go through some pretty hard times in our marraige and it also made my pack-rat tendancies very pronounced.

If I found a piece of....lets say a flashlight. I'd say to myself "we need flashlights...I'll keep this peice in hopes that I eventually find the rest of it and hopefully it will work once we get batteries." and this would happen with several things over the coarse of a few years and soon I had so many pieces of things to keep up with that it would all just be a horrible mess!!

A few years and a few pay raises later and we are much more sensible with money and have a little more to boot. So now I find a piece of flashlight and I say to myself "another piece of junk. In the garbage it goes!! If we need another flashlight we'll just go to target and buy one."

This has made cleaning and going through the stuff I've accumulated while going through the pack-rat phase much easier! Less stress is good, right? And things are a lot cleaner. This is especially good because I am STILL going through stuff I've squirrelled away from our old house. And I'm so happy it's so much easier for me to throw things away. Now my hoarding seems strictly confined to books and nail polish. I'm getting over the nail-polish hoarding thing (I recently threw away the dried-up remains of the nail polish I used for my best friends wedding....12 years ago LOL). The book thing I can't control. In fact, after the recent discovery of an UNHEARD OF Stephen King in the dollar store I bought half the books in there, tee-hee.

I'm also on the hunt for anything classical....Dickens, Austin, a whole bunch of other books. Anyway, I've been being good about not buying any more books until I've read everything in my house. Right now I'm trying to keep my book reading down to one book at a time. Well, two - cuz there's a book that stays in the bathroom and only gets read in there. It might take me four years to finish it but eventually it will get finished LOL. I have found I get through books much quicker if I read them one at a time. I finished "Missing Pieces" in a couple weeks and "Lady Sarah's Son" I got through in five days even though it wasn't that interesting LOL

In any case having a little more money and a little more sense with the money we do have has made the whole "pack-rat thing" MUCH easier to get through. Once I have the pack-rat neurosis completely worked through I'll have to work on the weight thing. I now weigh 160 pounds. If you want to know, that's FIVE POUNDS HEAVIER than I was when I was TEN MONTHS PREGNANT with child number five (fourth pregnancy). Not. Good. At. All.