I'm buying too much crap.

I paid my bank card bills yesterday. I pay the full balance every month, and have paid zero interest this year.

But I was astonished at how much I had spent in November and early December. More than any payment period since my retirement, and actually the most in probably five years, when I put a new Mac on a credit card.

Some of this was unavoidable. I had some work done on the car, for example, and bought paint and tools for this home cleanup project. I got the iPhone. I didn't need an iPhone, specifically, but I needed a new cell phone and the iPhone was what I got. It's been worth what I spent.

I spent a lot on Christmas lights because I had none at all. (Even though I'm not a Christian, I don't see any harm in celebrating the holiday – especially if Ms. Home Rehab Person is stringing the lights.) I don't anticipate that I'll ever have to buy Christmas lights again.

But the lion's share of the expenses were things I could have done just as well without. I got a great deal on a Breezer Uptown 8 commuter bike that I absolutely did not need. I had three bikes already, and I need to get rid of two of those. I bought another pair of sneakers because they were black and even though I have probably a half-dozen pairs of sneakers already, I didn't have any that were black. I bought some more SmartWool socks at about $17 a pair because they're the most comfortable cold weather socks I've found... and last a lot longer than the six-pair-for-five dollars tube socks I used to wear exclusively.

And a bunch of it is little nickel-and-dime stuff.

The issue here is not so much the money (although money is an issue) as all the stuff that is piling up at my house. I need to get rid of things without acquiring more.

If you've been reading Ms. Home Rehab Person's blog, you know that we collected four 'ginormous' bags of old clothes for giveaway. And took what turned out to be 139 pounds of laundry to the bundle service on Western for laundering.

Yes, that number was 139 pounds. And that's a long way from being all of my clothes.

Ms. HRP, who is not a Buddhist or Taoist, points out that I have a whole lot more crap in my house than she has. I talk about non-attachment, but when it comes to material possessions, I have a shitload of stuff. It may not be expensive luxury stuff – I don't own a single suit anymore, and I'm still driving the eight-year-old minivan – but the quantity of stuff is either impressive or oppressive, depending upon how you look at it. And I see it as a little of both.

So in the course of this home rehab project, I'm going to get rid of shitloads of stuff. There's not much here I want to get rid of, but I can't go on living like this.

But beyond just tossing stuff out or giving it away or selling it at a garage sale, I've got to get to the root of whatever it is that makes me buy so much stuff. I was doing really well for awhile, but not so well lately.