In addition to making the grapefruit marmalade (it's all made, just not packed or processed yet) I am spending a good part of the day taking down Christmas decorations. We bought several of those green and red bins so hopefully I can get rid of the down-at-heel copier paper boxes and really organize everything. If all goes well, next Thanksgiving we won't be spend nearly as much time finding holiday stuff because it'll all be in color coded bins and all packed together. We'll see.


The act of packing leads me to consider anew the amount of stuff I have. I'm pretty good about letting things go - I'm not really a packrat or anything, but there always seems to be some level of clutter that's hard to eliminate. Sure, some people advocate selling all your excess stuff on Ebay, but there's always the temptation that you'll turn around and buy someone else's stuff. We live in too rural of an area to have an effective yard sale (although we had great luck with them in Philadelphia) and I'm not sure I'd have the time to spend on one anyway. I'm even wary of mass donation to Goodwill and the like since I took some maternity clothes over to a location near my grandmother's apartment and saw the back room so crammed that it would take years for my stuff to reach the selling floor (in fact, the attendant told me that most donations are donated in turn from Goodwill to other groups or destroyed for their scrap value and that the volunteers had the first pass on anything that was kept). I ended up taking the clothes to the nearest womens' shelter. (At least I think I did - shelters are secretive places by design and necessity. The woman who returned my call was unwilling or unable to confirm that the clothes were going anywhere but the trunk of her car.)


So when I heard about the Freecycle movement my ears pricked right up. You mean I can just give all my stuff away to anyone who needs or wants it? I don't have to mess with listing, selling, or even throwing away things that still have a useful life but are no longer appropriate for mine? Awesome!


Charlottesville does not yet have an official Freecycle group and, in keeping with my nitpicky attitude toward stuff and it's disposal, I have a few issues with the concept. At the moment at least, it seems that Freecycle groups are organized solely through Yahoo groups. I understand the convenience of doing so, but the system seems also to leave out a significant part of the population who would find participation in this type of alternative economy useful and/or necessary for reasons beyond cleaning out the garage. I'm not sure what the answer is - or if I should just be patient while the movement matures and becomes larger and, hopefully, more inclusive. In the meantime, I'm definitely going to keep my eye on it.