Chequebook Archival

November 15, 2007

Realised this just yesterday. I’ve been saving my old chequebooks just for the record of cheques. This has been adding to the clutter in my cupboard for no good reason. I can happily copy all the chequebook entries to Excel. This will let me write even more detailed narrations, slice and dice my chequebook data, and of course throw the paper chequebooks away and cut down clutter.

About 60 entries over the past year and a half to transfer to Excel. This will be done with great urgency once I’m done with Sunday’s quiz.


Improvements at the Margin

November 10, 2007

Remember how I had been looking for bins to store my unironed laundry in? I found them!

Laundry Bins!

Much joy. A mess of scattered clothes which was engulfing one side of my hall has now been transferred to the laundry bins. As you can see on close examination, there are separate bins for undergarmaments, socks, and everything else.

This still isn’t perfect. For starters, the ‘everything else’ pile is still too big. This makes searching for specific items of everything else difficult. However, there is an easy solution to this: more bins! Two more bins will allow further segregation into shirts, trousers, and t-shirts. Less mess for just a hundred and sixty rupees.

However, the unorganised laundry was only one mess. There is also this ferocious one still to be dealt with:

Newspapers and Chaos

What you see above is the final frontier: quasi-mattresses (I refuse to call anything without springs a real mattress), newspapers, polythene bags stuffed with assorted papers, flatmate’s suitcase, and flatmate’s travel bag. However, this can also be dealt with – starting with more bins!

Another bin for newspapers will reduce the mess even further, and make it easier for the maid to carry the newspapers out for raddi. The most obvious contributor to clutter will be taken care of. That still leaves me with the following issues to deal with:

  1. Quasi-mattresses. Solution: donate them to maid, who wants them anyway. In case Beta Manav (or anybody else for that matter) visits, bring in a sleeping bag, which takes up less space than these things when it isn’t in use.
  2. Polythene bags filled with documents. Solution: buy display and clip files. File the documents which are needed. Throw away the ones which aren’t.
  3. Flatmate’s travel bag. Solution: throw it away. He doesn’t seem to notice it anyway.
  4. Flatmate’s suitcase. Solution: substitute flatmate’s medicines with arsenic (this was the plot of at least two Agatha Christies), stuff body in the suitcase, and dispose of suitcase and corpse by throwing it into the Indiranagar sewer. This prevents further messes from accumulating as well.

It is through small, continuous improvements, that we better our quality of life.


Laundry Management

September 11, 2007

Beloved readers (especially the Bangalore ones), please help. Does anybody know where I can buy the following things in Bangalore? Home Stop and Lifestyle don’t have them, and neither does the Dubai shop on CMH Road.

  1. A clotheshorse. As I mentioned earlier, drying clothes on the balcony puts them at risk of getting wet again in the rain, or being crapped on by pigeons.
  2. PVC bins. What I’m looking for is three or four bins with a small footprint, not too shallow and not too deep. The idea here is that when the clothes are dry, me or my maid can separate them into shirts, trousers, and miscellaneous, and store each category of clothes in its own bin through the week until I iron them on Sunday. Right now, everything is dumped into one undifferentiated pile on spread out newspapers, and it’s really quite distressing to look at. If the bins come in different colours, even better.

If you have a better idea for sorting dried laundry than bins, leave a comment about that, please.