New on the blog!

I´m not completely new on the blog. My old blog Miss Pinkeltonblog still exists but is no longer active due to a password problem. After doing some postings on Facebook I decided to start a blog again. Also decided to write it in English, quite a challenge for a non-native speaker. 


I hope you will forgive my grammatical errors but I´m in the middle of a language-identity-crisis. Being Dutch, living in Spain, in the city of Barcelona, where people prefer to speak Catalan, still feeling more comfortable in English, I decided to share my braindumps in a universal language. So to all you international souls, welcome to PinkeltonPlace. I hope you will enjoy your stay, may it be inspiring and fun!


When I started organizing my new workspace just recently, I came across these loose, unidentified objects. Papers, not even drawings more doodle like scribbles, plastic vendingmachine toys, thingies that I don´t even remember what, or who, they belonged to. Telephonenumbers without a name (should I call to find out  who the number belongs to, or just forget about it). What a mess. Every drawer, I opened had new surprises for me.  I panicked, really I felt completely incompetend to clean out this chaos. (unclutterer, useful site)


I started making piles. "throw away" pile, "maybe keep" pile, "defenitely not throwing away" pile. Instead of throwing away I ended up keeping everything but it was classified, no longer completely unidentified I guess. Nice stacks in the middle of my room.


After I investigated every pile on it´s content, (that took me about 3 days) I kept my organized chaos in neat drawers in my new tidy workspace. It made me feel proud of myself. I managed to get some overview of the stuff that´s been moving around with me, from my studentflat to my first apartment, first house, second one, and finally got packed up to be transported to Spain where we have been living since 2000


It´s embarrassing to see what you get attached to  through the years. And what once was a valuable treasure becomes an unnecessary burden as you get older.  I made some calculations and came to the terrible discovery that if I would keep on collecting "treasures" with the same velocity I´ve been collecting these past years, I most certainly would have to move to a bigger house within 2 years.


That´s defenitely not an options concerning global economical crisis. So there I just discovered a positive side effect of this financial constraining situation.  I had to decide what´s really important to me. Open the drawers and reconsider.


It was more easy than I expected. You just have to make rules, ask some questions about the object you have to throw away.  I came up with these three questions for objects that don´t have an emotional value:

• Does the object has a purpose,
• Is this purpose still active,
• When was the last time I actually used the purpose of this object.

The questions were very helpful and I  threw away lots of papers, thingies and classified, but still, "sort of" unidentified objects.


Although I had been cleaning out an impressive amount of things. There was more then enough left. This was the hard part. I had to go through stuff I´ve been collecting since childhood, with high emotional value.  They might seem stupid things, but every time I let them go through my hands I turn eight again, or twelve, even seventeen. I´m a desperate nostalgic person. And completely unable to say goodbey to my past.


To escape from my hectic and exciting present I mindtravel back to my childhood. Just to remember the feeling I got from the trees in my backyard. The comforting noise of the wind blowing through the leafs. The smell of autumn. It relaxes me, inspires me, makes me feel happy. But also sad 
because of things gone forever.


Because of my desperate need for the past I´ve seemed to forget that today is the past of tomorrow. Today is what my kids will remember and cherish in there future. It´s were they will escape to. This is a huge responsibility, and made me realise that I should be more aware of it. I´m the guardian of my childrens childhood memories now.
They don´t see the value of a first doll, or buzzlightyear, yet. They are way to busy growing up!


Thanks to this awareness I even managed to carry some of my emotional valuables to the garbage bin, and donated my empty drawers to the next generation.