December tally

Oh for Pete's sake. Are you all as sick of looking at my shoes as I am of thinking about them? Every month I start off strong, resolving to post every day and just finish this already for the love of god. And yet, every month I just lose my motivation. I told someone that even though I have probably another 40 pairs of so to go, I am just not inspired by any of them, which means I should probably just dump all of them. But that's not entirely true. A lot of it has to do with winter blahs. It's really much, much easier to stay in my pajamas all day and not even think about shoes or going outside. And then the photographing, the uploading...it's just too much for my winter blahs to think about. Of the 40 or so remaining, probably 10 are summery shoes I never got around to, 10 are really cool but totally rockin' professional shoes I have no reason to wear, and the rest are crap that should be deleted from my life. OK, well, I shall soldier on because the only thing worse than finishing this project is failing at finishing this project. I photographed a bunch of shoes for January, and have released my standard of having to wear them out of the house, so maybe this will go a bit faster. I'll pop those all up quickly, then start - and FINISH - February strong.

First, I have to report it's January 28th and I've already purchased two pairs of shoes this year. Eeep. I'm going to admit that I considered going cold turkey on ALL shopping for clothes and shoes for myself in 2011, but I just couldn't do it. Well, I was going to modify that resolution into only allowing second-hand purchases, but even that was too tough. So, let's recap December, which is hard because I think I made a math error in November's recap so I have to figure that out first, but here we go anyway.

In the month of December, I wore/examined 8 pairs of shoes from my collection, at a total cost of $143.50, or average cost of $17.94. Of those, I am keeping all 8, though later I am going to write about how I'm getting rid of one pair.

So, I've been blogging shoes for 214 days.

I have shown you 127 pairs of my shoes. I am keeping 108 (!) (on the fence about 6 of those, though I think I gave my mom one of those 6, I need to go back and check), trashing 3, donating 16.

So keeping 108 and getting rid of 19 is a cull rate of 15%. (My goal remains 20%, which means I have stacks to get rid of, and December didn't help me any).

And, I estimate that over the past 17 years or so I've spent $3,397.75 on shoes, or an average cost of $26.75 per shoe.

Wow, so that means I'm keeping 108 pairs of shoes. I've got to get with it so I can wrap this up by February.

My friend TSM made a really good suggestion a while back - she said once I had decided what I was keeping, I should then lay them all out, sort by category/color, and then re-evaluate. I want to do that though I'm not sure where I can set the full collection up! TSM even volunteered to come over and help, so I'll take her up on that. Actually, this is my interpretation of what she said, which was actually more along the lines of you seem to have lot of shoes that you don't wear but that 'make you smile' and maybe you should cull some of them. Which is also not exactly what she typed but what she sensibly meant.

I've been reading and watching Peter Walsh lately - he's a 'declutter expert' who talks about the types of clutter people have. I definitely have memory clutter - imbuing objects with memories. However, he's lost all credibility with me because I was watching his clutter show on the new Oprah Network and he told a woman with over 100 pairs of shoes that no one needed more than 10 pairs. Obviously, the man is delusional. No one needs over 100, I'll grant you that. But ten is purely punitive and, if putting together stylish, interesting outfits is something that interests you whatsoever, a ten-pair limit forces you to be radically unstylish. OK, anyway. Onward!