The organization ain't really organized

I have been spending the last few days attempting to, in internet parlance, unfuck my habitat.

Okay, to be honest, I just discovered that site when I was Googling "Unfuck Your Habitat" in an effort to properly credit whomever came up with that term.  I think I'm going to need to look into it a bit further.

But at any rate, my general impression of the concept was basically doing the little, and sometimes big, things needed to keep the domicile from being a giant clusterfuck of hopelessness and disorder.

That being said, I've been engaging in the re-arranging of cupboards and drawers, filing of receipts, and purging of stuffs and whatnots.  Frankly, there hasn't been quite as much purging as I had hoped, but I can't win them all. 

I've been visiting Pinterest again in hopes of picking up some DIY home organization tips, but I find a lot of the stuff involves a lot of resources I don't have on hand.  I did try this tip, which I had been curious about for some time, regarding folding T-shirts for easy access.  This is what I ended up with:

I am physically incapable of throwing out T-shirts.

Compared to the tutorial:

It's not a bad system.  The pictures on the original post exaggerate the amount of extra room you end up with.  Folding T-shirts in this manner doesn't reduce their volume at all - they still take up roughly the same amount of space.  The author mentioned cleaning out old ratty shirts, so maybe that accounts for the change in occupied space.

Also, the tutorials I've seen on this don't seem to account for someone whose clothing is not all the same size/volume due to fluctuating weight and other things, so unless all of your t-shirts

I do find it easier to look for something to wear though.  The real test will come on laundry day when I find out how much of a pain it will be to put newly-laundered t-shirts back in the drawers.

Sometime back The Well-Travelled One, being well-travelled and all, introduced me to the concept of rolling all your shit military style. 

This I like.  I may have gone a wee bit overboard.

My dingy as fuck dishtowels. If anyone needs ideas for Christmas/birthday... don't get me these.  I don't want dishtowels for my birthday.

My pajama/bathing suits/various ephemera drawer

Underwear and socks.  ROLL ALL THE THINGS.

Yes, I can now officially say the internet has seen my underwear.

In tackling the kitchen I realized a few things:

• I have a disturbing number of pairs of scissors
• My kids went through a cupcake phase that only seemed to last long enough that we managed to accumulate a ridiculous amount of cupcake liners, yet I don't recall actually having cupcakes more than three times in the last two years.

Last night I went through all my bills, receipts, old birthday cards and came to the conclusion that I probably have enough of this crap to insulate my house should I come across an industrial strength paper shredder.

Today I intend to tackle the basement and get the rec-room area, which we don't use since we lack anything recreational to put down there (mainly a TV.. we've got about 10 game consoles to hook up to a TV, but no TV), back into some semblance of shape after the Great Christmas Excavation, known to laypeople as 'Pulling out the tree and decorations'.

Speaking of Christmas... does anyone else find it weird that right after Christmas, all the big box stores have sales on storage and organizational equipment, as if to say "Here, it's time to pack away all the useless shit we've been guilting people into buying you for the last four months?"

Gender Essentialism in Your Stocking This Christmas

This showed up on my Pinterest feed yesterday:

Source

It's a list of stocking stuffer ideas for Christmas, by age.  I groaned inwardly when I saw that it was divided into a list for boys and one for girls.  Then I got a little optimistic when I saw that the first half-dozen or so items on the list were identical.  Play dough, art supplies, bubbles, stickers.. I can totally get behind this list.

And then as I continued to scroll down, my heart dropped with an almost audible sitcom trombone chorus - You know the one... wah wah waah waaaaah. About six or seven lines down, we get to the inevitable.  Cars and action figures for boys, dolls and jewellery for girls.

*sigh*

Can we step out of our boxes for a minute and consider the fact that some little girls just might enjoy playing with cars?  Or maybe there are little boys that enjoy playing with dolls?

I know many people will jump up with "But My Daughter LIKES dolls! My Son Likes Trucks! They wouldn't WANT to play with trucks/dolls!"  That's awesome.  Really, it is.

Your kid is not EVERY kid.

How many kids out there aren't getting what they would really like for Christmas because lists like these reinforce gender stereotypes that dictate what toys are appropriate for what gender? I'm not even going to get into the assumption of a gender binary here, because people tend to lose their shit when faced with the suggestion that a kid may be anything more than all-boy or all-girl.

What I wonder is why the creator of this image couldn't have amalgamated these items into one list and done away with the unnecessary gendering of sunglasses, jewellery, Nerf Guns and Barrels of Monkeys?

Speaking as a former little girls I, for one, LOVED Barrel of Monkeys.  It was a goddamned barrel of FUN.

UPDATE: So last night I posted a comment on the blog where this image originally came from asking, very diplomatically, why split the list into boys/girls, since parents clearly would already know whether their kids were into dolls or trucks, regardless of gender.  I wish I had taken a screen cap, because I went back to see if there was a response and my comment has been deleted.  I followed up, although I doubt my response will garner a response.

There's also a disclaimer at the top of the blog now asking not to leave harsh comments regarding the splitting of the lists into boys/girls.  That may or may not have been there before I commented.  I hadn't really paid attention, so if it was already there, my bad.