Dejunking

 

8/9/24 Preserve & Gather, Crown Hill neighborhood

You may recall that I’ve been hauling stuff to Goodwill. It’s not just a sporadic thing; I’m on a huge mission to dejunk, unclutter and ultimately downsize my house. I won’t be moving for a long time, but I’m making a few long-needed home improvements that will require moving nearly all the furniture, so I’m taking advantage of that need to rearrange and change some of the rooms’ functions. (Some plans are purely functional, but others are exciting! More will be revealed eventually.) My goal is to make one trip per week to Goodwill or other charities.

Seeing and using roomy closets, drawers and cabinets are truly satisfying, making the project self-rewarding. Who knew that drawers were meant to slide open and closed without effort! However, I’ve only been at it a month, and I know it’s going to be hard to stick with this lengthy process. To stay motivated, I’ve been rewarding myself with sketching and noshing on treats after I’ve finished my weekly haul.

8/23/24 Doce Donut Boston Creme (imagination and memory)

Takeout only at Doce, which means "dozen"
in Spanish

Ideally, I like to sketch on location wherever I’m enjoying the treat, but Doce Donut Company (review at end of post) is a storefront only without seating, so I had to bring my Boston Crème home. For that page, I decided to sketch a few items that went out in that week’s haul. Although I do occasionally take photos of certain items that are meaningful to me before I get rid of them, these sketches were done from memory and imagination. (The salad shooter was an especially humorous exercise! I know I could have Googled for images, but that tool, which I used maybe only once or twice decades ago, was weird enough that I thought I’d try it completely from vague memory and mostly imagination.)

Of note here is that the week’s haul included four bags of art and craft materials, most of which were bad colored pencils I’d used briefly to review. Some were so bad that I would have felt guilty giving them to other sketchers at the next Gab & Grab! I feel good, however, giving them to Seattle ReCreative, a non-profit that sells donated materials to support schools and community organizations.

Art materials that I know I will never use again are low-hanging fruit in my downsizing efforts. The tough job will be all the many, many products I own that are decent to use but usually aren’t what I reach for. I could be happy with them – but they aren’t my favorites. Arrgggh – so many fall in that category.

I think I’ve finished the low-hanging fruit in most areas of my house by now – the clothes closets, kitchen, multiple junk drawers and even some books were surprisingly easy. Much harder and more time-consuming (and next to come) will be papers that require examining carefully (can they be tossed or do they need to be shredded?), expensive items (give away or try to sell?), some books, and items with sentimental value. Oh yeah, and all those art supplies.

Related to that: Writing product reviews has been an enormously fun part of this blog, but necessary to my downsizing mission will be drastically reducing (but certainly not eliminating) the number of new products I bring in. Sadly, that means fewer reviews, but my blog is still rewarding to me in many other ways, so I’m not concerned about the change in terms of my own satisfaction. If you follow my blog mainly for reviews, I hope you won’t be too disappointed by the change. Thanks for staying with me!

Doce Donut Review

Boston Creme made with a brioche dough -- yum!

No, I don’t intend to replace art supply reviews with donuts (at least donuts wouldn’t take up space in my house, but they would on my hips), but after last June’s personal donut tour of Portland, I couldn’t resist offering my thoughts on Doce Donut. Startlingly, this small local chain with a shop located only a couple of miles from home in the Fremont neighborhood had been off my radar until only recently! How that happened is a mystery, but you can bet I put it on my list of dejunking reward venues.

The other amazing thing is how I learned about Doce in the first place: Instagram had “recommended” a post from a young woman who had taken the Underground Donut Tour in Seattle! Whaaat??! How was that off my radar? (And shouldn’t I be leading it?) Upon further research, however, the tour sounded like a tourist rip-off: Participants walk from Belltown to Pike Place Market, sampling four donut shops in two hours, all for $60. That sounds a bit steep, and even I can’t eat four donuts in two hours (though I might not object to trying). More to the point, I was familiar with all but Doce, so joining the tour made no sense. I needed to test Doce on my own. (It turns out that donut tours are a popular attraction, and you can take one all over the US and outside it, too.)

Like my top pick Blue Star in Portland, Doce’s donuts are made of a raised brioche dough, which typically contains butter and eggs. (And also like Blue Star, Doce offers vegan options that are more like traditional donuts.) Although they offered at least seven or eight varieties the morning I was there, including a Churro Dulce de Leche that I considered for a while, I picked a classic Boston Crème. Holy smokes, that went down easy – light, not dense, and not overly sweet. It’s a good thing they don’t have comfy seating with a good sketching view – I’d be there way too often.