Living the life you have...

I would claim not to be a collector or hoarder, but I've just discovered I have a very large collection indeed.  Of marbles.  How can this be?

My mother was quite the marble champeen in her day.  This is not hereditary, so I'm not pointing fingers.  But there was a collection of marbles (in a blue metal tin) from my parents when I was growing up .  I like marbles (what's not to like?) so when I had my own home, I put them into pretty glass jars by color and displayed them on windowsills as suncatchers.  Pretty.

Pausing for true confessions - I admit that for all my air of puzzlement and wonder, I do have a magpie sparkly acquisitive streak a mile wide.  Despite having such severe shortsightedness that the New Zealand taxpayer funds my contact lenses in the infrequent intervals they need replacing, I have in a tiny little bag one tiny little cubic zirconia and one great hurking 1 carat plus CZ.  Both of these I spotted on the street and my little beady eye somehow processed them as not just random glass cracklings.  You explain it, I can't.  I also always find coins on the road.  In one moment too unlikely to invent, my husband once gleefully pounced on a nearby coin, only to have me stroll over and pick up the $2 one not far away.

Fast forward to our current house, which has wooden Venetian blinds everywhere.  Bye bye windowsill displays.  With nowhere to put my precious pretties, I naturally... put them back into a box for years.  I took out one jar because my son likes marbles, but I doled them out super carefully (I'm sure I had a great reason for this that escapes me now.)

With the large collection stored out of mind, and with both children enjoying the feel of marbles and other smooth glass objects during their preschool activities, I started buying bags of marbles when they appeared at my favourite secondhand shop.  $2 for a big bag of marbles and glass treasures, hooray!  Tuck that away for next birthday... oh, the cleverness of me.

In my grand decluttering effort, I have rediscovered my marble display jars, much the worse for wear from storage.  Still nowhere to put them even if I wanted to display icky jars.  But with my new mindset, of course I decanted them all into the current marble collection.   And thus I have an embarrassment of marbles.

At two litres or so, I have exceeded any possible normal fondness for marbles.  I admit enjoying plunging my hand into the bucket and rolling them around, but you can only do that so many times.  The kids look a bit confused, play with a few of the cool ones, and eventually dump them all over the floor.

This chronicle is the longhand history of only one lot of unnecessary stuff that's innocently taken over my life, simply because I didn't bother to acknowledge that certain things I owned no longer had a home in our new home.

We have kitchen things committing the same crime - our new house has an insanely small oven which can't even take a standard cookie tray.  Yet we still have large expensive roasting pans from the days of yesteryore when our oven was from the good old days and could roast the Christmas turkey.   The only way we can use these pans is with a kitchen remodel.  Yet they are only now appearing on the "begone" list.

And hands up anyone else who has stacks of clothes for the size they want to be again?  I admit I'm still not giving up on this one!

How much of your clutter is from places you used to live, or for the home you wish you were in, or for the  person you wish you were?

I assure you, I will be working very hard to lose my marbles.  And what would you make of two wildly mismatched cubic zirconias?