Minimalism and Green Living Update

After several initial purges, I have been going through a minimalism dry spell.  We've gotten rid of several large pieces of furniture, at least half of our wardrobe, at least half of our books, and the more we get rid of, the more stuff we notice we don't need.  But it's been a bit tricky with some items, as we want to sell some, gift others, and not just donate things that we feel are more valuable.  

The other problem is that the biggest category in need of decluttering is paperwork, and that's really hard!  I scanned and recycled all of our photos, leaving only our military scrapbook, wedding album, and an album with old photos of older relatives and our countries of birth.  Now we have these three albums on a shelf for easy access to share with guests, and all the other photos are on our external computer drive for whenever we may want to find them.

The next project is converting VHS tapes to DVDs at Walmart, which I intend to get done before the next update. 

As for green living, I was holding off on composting because we were going to buy a house, but then we put a hold on that and I want to get an apartment-compatible composter, which isn't being met with equal enthusiasm from the hubster.  Other than that, hubby is growing some jalapeno and ghost peppers on our balcony, which does me no good because I don't like or tolerate spicy food.  As for the cloth versus disposable diaper dilemma, we're sort of out of that, as Natalia is 90% potty independent, so we no longer wonder if it's better for the environment to launder cloth diapers or to dump disposable ones into the landfill :)  Win-win!