Where do you all come from?

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Started 4 months ago by behejo
Latest reply from Laetitia in Australia
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behejo
Member

Dear ATAD companions

All the posts gave me the impression that we built a pretty global network. I know that some of you sit in the US, some in Australia and some here in Europe - as I do. But where exactly?!? And I am just curious to learn where your homes are and maybe a bit more about you....I am just a nosy and /or interested person (but also know and respect limits, of course).

It's quite funny that my brain has already started making 'pictures' of the longtime bloggers as I red bits and pieces over the time anyway. It would be interesting to see, if my fantasy was right or if it betrayed me ;-)

I hope not offending anyone or crossing a line. So let's start with myself:
I am nearly 42 (next week Saturday), born and raised in Germany, moved to Switzerland in 99 and met my DH who is a Swede in 04. We own a house nearby Zurich (about 15 km away, it's a small unknown village) with a garden (we love gardening). My son was born in June 2010. I am working 2.5 days a week as an assessment consultant. I love my 2 cats, enjoy baking and reading and I strive for the perfect, cosy yet functional home....that's why I'm dedicated to ATAD.

I hope you join in, it would really be so interesting to learn about you.

Posted 4 months ago #
liag
Member

Please resond to behejo-- it is interesting. Me:65 years young, living since 1981 in Houston, TX. Born in PA.Lived in NYC, Japan, KY, NJ.Husband from Middle East and Berkeley, CA. Ex-English/reading teacher, now retired. Spouse a former engineer.2 kids in Carolinas, 3 grandkids. Neurotic declutterer who struggles with collector husband and little else of her own to purge. Love all of you and also am picturing everyone according to name. Name "liag" from childhood practice of sometimes speaking backwards. Loving hearing all of your comments--a fun part of my retired day.

Posted 4 months ago #
Jennifer
Member

Hey fun idea!

I'm 34, a Canadian, lived in numerous places in Western Canada until 2008, when I moved down here to Oregon for my job. I live on the horse sanctuary I manage so am always at work. ;-)

Share my home with 2 dogs and 3 cats. Hobbies include photography, reading, and apparently fooling around on the internet.

I'm very type A, with a little OCD thrown in the soup, so clutter and disorganization and things out of place bother me a lot. I'm working towards removing anything in my life that does not contribute to its wonderfulness, and changing my mindset about purchases. Giving up on 'competing' with others in terms of income and posessions is also something I struggle with, but am improving all the time! The fact is I am a single person working for a non-profit, still paying on student loans with a depressed American dollar, and I will never bring home what my double income professional friends do, or drive a new car every two years, or drops loads of money shopping, and that's perfectly ok.

Posted 4 months ago #
luxcat
Member

turned 37 today, married, currently living in Southern California but my family is in Europe (Ireland)and my husband's family is in Spain.

Currently living in a condo and hoping to move into a house sometime this summer.

I seem to be working all the time (have not yet figured out how to declutter the job) and have few hobbies currently except for reading, which I adore, and decluttering, which I also adore. I declutter to improve the quality of my life, to reduce stress, to improve time management, and to reduce my impact on the environment.

Posted 4 months ago #
Astreja
Member

I'm 54, Canadian with Norwegian and Scots ancestors. Born in Montreal but have been living in Winnipeg since the mid-1970s. Currently single, and rather enjoying it after about 35 years of Significant Others starting in my teens. One adult daughter; she's a fantasy artist, writer and occasional gourmet cook. I share my 3-storey house with a dark legion of pussycats, currently 7 of 'em.

Currently I work in the medical field; prior to that, I was in IT. I study clarinet and play in 3 community bands (2 during the school year and 1 during the summer months). I also write novels but am taking a break till I revise and/or unclutter previously written material.

Personality-wise I like a solid routine with the occasional outburst of manic silliness (e.g., late night emergency book runs). Easily distractible and sensitive to objects in my peripheral vis... Hey, look at that cute little squirrel in the tree outside!

Posted 4 months ago #
behejo
Member

@liag, so your name is Gail....my username is a composition of the first 2 lettres of mine and my DH given names and our surname, you see I am not the most creative person in the world. Oh my name is Beatrix.

@Jennifer, I once had a so called career, earning good money, could afford big flat, nice car, fancy vacation....but I was lonely and sad deep down inside of me, following your mission in life might not make you rich, but definitively happy!

@luxcat: congratulations!

@Astreja: you have impressed over the past year, reading your posts make me humble, you seem to rebuilt your whole house. Could you lend me a bit of your routine skills....I am sooooo bad at it?!

Posted 4 months ago #
Mimi
Member

hey this is fun. maybe we could have an uncluttered unclutterer gallery on flickr like this before-after-group? i´d love to see who i am talking to!
ah, and i am from germany.

Posted 4 months ago #
liag
Member

It IS fun! I still want to win the lottery and then rent a hall--perhaps in Paris?--and fly us all in to meet andspeak in a clutter-free way.
@luxcat: I have never felt less cluttered as I do now in a highrise condo; we had to get rid of so much to downsize. I love having everything at my fingertips, and I love more having less OF everything.
@Behejo: But you ARE creative with that naming.
Come on, everyone else: what's your story?

Posted 4 months ago #
lucy1965
Member

@Jennifer: as someone who wound up riding herd on the children of people who had that income and those toys? You're not missing as much as you think.

My closest friend is going to be managing a seven-figure estate when her parents die -- and she lives with her family in a comfortably run-down house in Oregon, her kids tear around in clothes from the thrift store so it's okay to climb trees and get muddy, and she does work she loves and doesn't lose sleep over not having the newest shiny thing. Her parents don't get it, but she's happy and the kids are sane(ish, but I'm their "mad Auntie Lucy" and have teasing rights).

Ideally, yes, you would have both. *grin*

Posted 4 months ago #
candy
Member

This is fun!

I was born and raised in Sweden, but knew from an early age that I would live abroad, at least for some time. And so I did, for 7 years. After the university I moved to Switzerland, then to France and married a French guy. I divorced some 17 years ago and moved back to Sweden, not to my native west coast but to Stockholm, and I've lived here since then except for 6 months in Denmark (that adventure was supposed to last longer, but the company suddenly decided to downsize and I decided to move back to Stockholm).

As for stuff, I've been through more or less everything ranging from moving to Switzerland with nothing but a suitcase full of clothes, via moving from France to Sweden with what could fit into my Ford Fiesta, to sharing a flat with a friend, to living alone in parallell in two fully furnished apartments, one in Stockholm and one in Copenhagen. I now live in a one bedroom condo in the center of Stockholm, which suits me perfectly. I love city life.

I'm a midimalist (I think it was ninakk who invented that expression), which means that my apartment is more minimalistic than most, but I also have some really beautiful artwork here and there (not necessarily worth a lot of money, but beautiful to my eyes). And too many wine glasses. And probably too many shoes. When I got my first apartment here in Sweden I used to do weekly rounds at flea markets and second hand stores and bought a lot of stuff (mostly '50s stuff before it became popular) but I've sold nearly all of it now, it was getting overwhelming.

I love to travel, I love art and I love music so I try to combine these interests into city trips for concerts or art events. I still do flea markets and second hand stores, but I'm a lot more selective nowadays.

I see that many of you have animals, that's nice. I have had cats, and I will most certainly have at least one cat again some day.

Oh... and my user name comes from my interest in music - the song "Candy Says" by Velvet Underground.

Posted 4 months ago #
mskris
Member

Hi, this is great getting to "know" everyone! I'm Kris (obviously, from my screen name). I'm 48 (yikes!), married with 3 kids aged 16, 13, & 7. The eldest and youngest have ADHD, so their disorganization makes me want to demonstrate by being organized myself. I suddenly realized this time last year that I don't have to purge/organize my house in a weekend, so I'm gradually doing it and feeling so much better! My family has lots of STUFF - and I have to admit I'm guilty, too, so I'm using all the wonderful advice on here to decide what adds value to my existence and what doesn't.

Recently, DH (who's been un/underemployed for the past 2 yrs) and I have started talking about downsizing. We have a 3100+ sf house and it's just exhausting trying to keep up with it (not to mention we'd like to spend money on other things)! We'd love to find a 3-4 bedroom townhouse that uses space more efficiently (we never use our formal living and dining rooms - I'd love to have a great room design). If we can recoup our investment in our current home, we plan to go for it. Otherwise, we may have to wait for the market to improve (hopefully in the next few years).

Oh! Forgot to mention I live in Southeastern PA, USA, orginally from Northern (NY state border) NJ. I'm a medical writer in the pharmaceutical industry.

Thanks to all of you for your wonderful support!

Posted 4 months ago #
chacha1
Member

Awesome idea. :-)

I am 46, married for ten years to a now-52-yr-old Filipino personal trainer & physical therapist assistant who was born in San Francisco. I was born in a tiny village in Minnesota and grew up in the upper Midwest (my folks moved a lot) till we moved to Georgia the summer before I turned 7. I lived in Georgia till I was 29 and then moved to Los Angeles.

I have an older sister who lives in North Carolina with her wife and we are going to visit them in April, I'm very excited. My parents are still married and live in St. Augustine, FL. DH's parents are still married and live in San Francisco. DH has two siblings but they are not close. We don't have any kids; instead we have two very spoiled middle-aged cats.

We are lifelong renters with a 1500-sq-foot midcentury apartment we have filled with Chinese furniture and books and art and empty space to dance in. We own a timeshare and like to take at least one weeklong vacation a year, generally to an exchange property somewhere in driving distance where there is some combination of 1) mountains 2) water 3) wine. So far we have stayed mostly in California but also had a week in Sedona and a week on the Olympic Peninsula, gorgeous.

I have a Master's degree in History but have worked full-time in legal support (specialty: patents) since 1989. I got a personal-training certification in 2008 and a ballroom instructor certification in 2009. Those are my "exit strategy" for the day when we have paid off a retirement property on the Central Coast and can stop doing what we do for a living.

I met DH in a beginner ballroom class and we still dance socially and compete, I do a little teaching on the side and we both volunteer with local dance organizations.

In my spare time (HA!) I do a little painting, a little costumery, I make some jewelry and bead-oriented art, I read A LOT, I have a patio garden where hummingbirds like to hang out, and I've been learning to cook over the past 3 years, starting to get pretty good.

Posted 4 months ago #
grey
Member

excellent post! i've enjoyed getting to know posters and see little snippets of their lives in other threads.

i grew up in the eastern US, moved to Canada for college, married a Canadian, and after several years in eastern Canada we moved to British Columbia. couldn't be happier and have no real intentions of moving again. immigration has put a hold on my career aspirations so i'm currently a stay at home wife. i've always been quite keen on decluttering, but more recently, i've taken it to another level. i think "midimalist" describes my aspirations quite well.

have really enjoyed reading and contributing to this forum. it's a great source of inspiration and it's always fun to chat with people who "get" the whole decluttering thing. it's very foreign in a culture where most people aspire to have more more more.

and grey just happens to be my favorite color :-)

Posted 4 months ago #
Rosa
Member

I grew up in little towns in Iowa, Wisconsin & Nebraska (that's the American Midwest), bummed around for a few years after college (London, New York, southern Indiana), ended up in an "inner-city" neighborhood in Minneapolis, Minnesota that looks surprisingly like a small town in Iowa or Nebraska :)

I'm getting close to 40, with a slightly younger boyfriend, a 6 year old son, 2 cats, and 2 guinea pigs. My son has some behavioral challenges, so I recently quit my job to be able to do social/behavioral stuff with him in the afternoons instead of having him in an afterschool program he was not doing well in.

Posted 4 months ago #
PJ
Member

Another Canadian here.

My username is a sometimes nickname of mine - PJ for Pamela Joy. I was born in Montreal but moved to Toronto when I was 11. Brief stints in London, Ontario and Iqaluit, Nunavut. I'm 41 and never married, live on the main floor of a house I rent from my parents (my sister and niece live downstairs), and share the house with 2 dogs (a pitbull and a possible boxer/Fila brasiliero mix) and 4 cats. All are rescues, some with sadder stories than others. I'm a deacon right now and about to be ordained as a priest in the Anglican church on Jan. 29. I love reading and various kinds of crafts. I know there are other crafters on here - I'm also PJ on http://www.swap-bot.com, a fun site but the source of at least some of my current clutter.

I was always known as "the messy one" in our family though, so I can't blame it all on swap-bot, which I only joined a year ago. I struggle with perfectionism and procrastination, and although I would say I'm an intense personality, I'm not driven to complete or accomplish things. So I leave off projects in the middle of them. Justin Case and I are good friends. I also have a lot of interests and jump from one thing to the next, accumulating stuff in the process. I'm sentimental, and not *entirely* convinced that my childhood stuffed animals don't have souls ;-)

So in other words, it's a miracle I'm not a hoarder, as I have just about every other kind of clutter problem possible!

Posted 4 months ago #
lottielot
Member

Happy birthday, luxcat!
Rosa, I didn't realise you quite your job: is your son doing better now?
This is kind of weird, I feel like I know all this stuff about everyone already, but from tiny little snippets instead of proper introductions like this :)
Ok, I'm nearly 40, grew up up in Australia but have lived in the UK for 20 years, dh is English. I have a 6 and a 9 year old, both boys. I used to be a chemist but decided working and kids didn't mix when dh works stupid hours and childcare costs were more than I earnt. But I'm a crap housewife, so I did a psychology degree and started a part time masters just over a year ago, and I just got a job teaching a few hours a week via distance learning, and I just became a school governor too, which is voluntary. I have an allotment to fret about, 2 very old cats, I love aerobics and just started running, like cooking (well, eating, but I'm the one at home), camping, walking, reading, films and cultural stuff, and other hobbies when I get inspired. We live in a rather small and cramped semi and my kids' and dh's stuff threatens to overwhelm the place quite regularly, hence I joined here about a year and a half ago in order to gain some semblance of control. Still working on that, but domestic life has certainly been less chaotic since I started.

Posted 4 months ago #
Lori Paximadis
Member

Fun! I just turned 45 and have been married almost five years. We have no kids, but we do have several nieces and nephews and three cats. I grew up in Northeast Ohio, went to Columbus for college and ended up staying there 11 years, lived in Honolulu for six years, then moved back to Northeast Ohio 10 years ago. I'm an editor and publishing project manager by profession, and I also have a side business making jewelry.

I had always lived in small houses and apartments until we bought our current house. We admit that it's bigger than we need on a day-to-day basis, but to be in the kind of area we wanted to be in and have the kind of lot we wanted, we had to go bigger than ideal. Since I work at home, I'm delighted to have a good-sized office and a separate studio. The whole house has lots of natural light. It's nice, too, to have dedicated space for guests and room to entertain, which I love to do. And we don't have a basement, which I consider a plus, especially after the wet year we've had. Our house was built in the late 1960s and has an unusual design -- there are very few 90-degree angles here. Furniture placement can be a challenge.

While my family wasn't poor, we didn't have a lot of extra, so when I went out on my own in a notoriously low-paying profession, I became a bit of a stuff saver, just in case, and had a tendency to buy stuff on sale because it was a good deal, and if I needed it sometime in the future, it wouldn't be such a good deal then, so I better buy it now. I'm also somewhat sentimental, so I used to hang on to a lot of things because they remind me of people or events, not because I liked them for what they were.

I'm not a minimalist -- nowhere close to that, nor do I ever want to be -- but I get a lot of value from this site and participating in the community. Over the past six years or so, I've been able to let go of a lot of stuff that was weighing me down and had no current use in my life. I'm less compelled to acquire "good deals" and to hang on to stuff that doesn't delight me.

It's nice to get to know more about the people behind the user names.

Posted 4 months ago #
Rosa
Member

Lottie - he's doing about the same, but since it's just school and then one-on-one friend time instead of school and then afterschool program, he's a lot happier and less stressed (though by Friday he's about checked out - I am in the school Friday mornings now, plus earlier in the week if things are extra chaotic, and this morning he was just sitting by himself alternately doing work and staring off into space. I think his ability to deal with social stuff is only up to about a 4 day school week.)

Posted 4 months ago #
lucy1965
Member

Happy birthday, luxcat!

. . . I didn't write about myself in the post above, did I? *blush*

Just turned 47, husband is a couple of years younger; I was born on the upper edge of the Appalachian Mountains in Pennsylvania (think poor rural coal mining town); moved to the Great Basin area, married at 19, and left the marriage 10 years later with my son and the clothes on my back. Met DH at a community radio station, went to Minnesota for a while, and wound up coming back to a different part of the Intermountain West for work.

Now that the job that brought us here is gone, we're planning to move to the Pacific Northwest after our now-adult son and his partner move out this summer. At the moment I'm in a 100-year-old Craftsman bungalow that's slowly being divested of stuff: I bought a LOT of things out of the sheer joy of having disposable income, and DH is the very-late-in-life child of people who lived through the Great Depression, and is struggling with a lifetime of acquaintance with Justin Case. Going from 3400 square feet plus a garage to maybe 1200 square feet and a paid parking space is a challenge!

What else -- the son is 24, there are four senior cats (the two eldest are 16) despite DH's allergies: his "sucker light" is visible from space. The apartment we're hoping to move into offers free streetcar passes to residents and there are two Zipcars parked a block away, so the 12-year-old car may be rehomed at some point. Health issues mean I can't do any sort of impact exercise and most of my reading is now done electronically, but I hope to get back to sweep rowing, and converting the library to e-books means less to move and my parents no longer fret over appropriate gifts.

Posted 4 months ago #
Anita
Member

Nice to "meet" everyone! I second the Flickr group and the Paris meet-up ;)

I'm Ana - an ex-boyfriend used to call me Anita. I liked it, so it stuck as my online name. I was born and raised in Romania, moved to Canada in 2003 and have lived in Ottawa, Ontario, ever since. I'm now 26 (27 in March) and living with my boyfriend and 2 very spoiled cats (both rescued and around 2.5 years old).

Right now I'm working hard to unclutter my present job and start a business. I'm also a photographer, salsa dancer and occasional crafter. Uncluttering has really helped me keep up all my hobbies and interests, without turning my home upside down or killing my cat-and-dust-allergic boyfriend.

Posted 4 months ago #

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