One of the biggest challenges I'm going to have in reducing the number of items I own is cutting my wardrobe down to size. As any fashion enthusiast knows, editing down a wardrobe can be tough. My roommates will attest that my collection is way over the limit (2/3 of it is hanging around the house since I ran out of room in my closet and drawers). I'm lucky in that I'm at a phase in my style where I'm thinking of quite a bit of turnover already, and there are a few items I have been holding on to way too long as it is). The unfortunate thing about many of the items I would sell is that I had a mishap with some moths a couple of years back and there are some minor holes in some major items that will limit their resale value or eliminate it completely. For this reason a lot of my collection is going to be going to charity or will become hand-me-downs to my brothers. 

Although I've picked up a few things from Goodwill in the past, I've never given back, and so Goodwill looks like the obvious place for my overstock to go. One of my favourite things about goodwill is that the y don't just jack up the price because something is "designer" like some of the other centres that accept clothing donations, so I am confident that my clothing will find a good home there, or go to someone in need.

As per the Goodwill smart donating tips, I'm going to need to wash everything I donate first (dry clean items will likely get a hand wash unless they are only suitable for drycleaning), so that will be a few loads. There may also be some expense for the drycleaning, but I won't know until I itemize everything.

Other steps I will be taking to cut down my wardrobe are to give things to friends or siblings, and to simply compact the amount of space I am using to store my wardrobe by being smart about where the items are stored and why (I have been dressing far more casually in the last couple of years, so my suiting and suit accessories need to find a less prevalent spot to roost for now).

For my clothes that have sentimental value, I will take photos of them on a flat surface prior to disposing of them in the selected manner.

For my clothes that have been hanging around even though they are getting to the point that they are too damaged to be kept, they will make friends with the trash.

Time to get started.

Let's get one thing out of the way right away so I don't get any comments about it. I know that Helium is "He" on the Periodic Table. I didn't like the way it looked. Besides which, this is a post about minimalism and simplicity, so let's just go with the "H" (now, no one tell hydrogen, it has a tendency to explode when it's agitated).

One of the things I've been interested in for sometime is applying abundant (though not extreme) simplicity to my life. With me, as with most people, this starts with clutter.

We all seem to accumulate many "things" over the course of life. Often these things have sentimental value, and lack entirely in any utility beyond their ability to trigger a fond memory. Other times, items of little value to us persist in our homes because of the abundance of space, only being tossed when moving into a new space or making room for another item that holds more value to us, for the time being.

I have attempted various steps in the past to cull the items in my inventory down to only those that have value to me, attempting to even dispose of the sentimental items by taking photos of them. Their main value to me is simply the memories that they conjure up, and their physical existence is not necessary to provide that value so long as I can find a photo when digging through my computer (in doing this I have made sure that I am backed up thoroughly with both a local hard drive and a remote one).

In spite of these steps, I have continued to accumulate different sorts of things. This is in no small part due to my involvement with photography and my interest in fashion. Both tend to involve a lot of hoarding various props, backdrops, boots in ten different styles and so on. 

This project is going to catalogue my efforts to try and achieve a more lightweight lifestyle. It will dip into a number of efforts to minimize my various collections of things and I will likely document these efforts in a broad way while also providing very specific advice to those who try to live a fashionable lifestyle with as few items as possible.

My next post will cover some steps I am planning to kickstart my efforts.

Having spent the last several days on my "one new thing a month" crusade, I've found a number of unexpected side-effects from trying something new. I've chosen to spend this month going for a walk every day for 30 minutes (or more) and besides the planned effects of getting myself up on my feet and getting my blood circulating for 30 minutes, I've found that it makes an excellent activity to destress at the end of the day.

Like many people, I work long hours every day (or most of them) in a desk job. I have the ability to turn my desk into a standing desk for periods of the day (which I do) but I'm still mostly sedentary. I'm not sure if you've read the latest news articles or studies, but more and more of them are finding that this will greatly shorten our collective average lifespan, particularly when combined with obesity. This is compounded for me because most of my hobbies also involve long hours sitting at a desk.

So, today I was finishing off another long day at work, even longer than usual, seeing me get home around 11pm. My plan as I trudged home was to turn something on TV and go to bed, never mind that I have some deadlines coming up a couple of my side-projects. Instead, realizing that I hadn't found time for a walk yet today, I kept my promise to myself and headed out the door. After 30 minutes of walking through my perfectly serene neighbourhood at night, I returned back to my house and, will you know it, I've found the energy to keep working for a couple of hours. So that's what I'm going to do.

I didn't anticipate getting this late-night burst of energy just from going for a brief walk before bed but, there it was, and here I am.

Have a good night all.

Before you start to think that I've simply turned this into a sandwich blog (not a bad idea), I figure I better write about other things to show what else to expect now that I'm broadening the scope of this space.

I looked up an article I read once before I sat down to write this but I can't seem to find it now (cool story, bro). It was written by a guy who tried to broaden his horizons by trying one new habit every month. It's not exactly a new idea, but his pursuit of it was probably the best case study I could point out. Nonetheless, the show must go on.

This is something that I'm going to try and incorporate into my own life, and I highly recommend that you give it a shot too. I have two good reasons: 1. It's easy, and 2. It will make your life better. 

Let me explain.

I like to think that we all, or at least most of us, have good intentions for continuing to expand our lives in new and wonderful ways every year. We all sit down at New Years and think of how we want to become the best possible version of ourselves the next day: "Right after I finish puking up this egg nog, it's going to be a whole new me!"

That's almost a direct quote from someone I know, but it could be any of us. The problem is, that we almost all suck at following through on these promises for more than a few weeks, if that long. There are entire industries built around our failure to accomplish tasks we set out to do!

This is where the one new thing a month comes in. As Aristotle said, 

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit.”

You won't just wake up one day and become excellent; no one does. You become that way by pushing yourself a little bit further until you have built up these habits of excellence. This is the same way that anyone gets there, and there aren't any shortcuts (and if you don't believe me, then I have a 'Get ripped in 30 days' book that I'd like to sell you). By simply committing to incorporating one new habit into your life every month, you can become excellent as the momentum of your habits build and build, pushing you forward.

If you want to try this out, I highly recommend it, but start slow. I'm going to start this month; my habit is simply going for a walk for 30 minutes every day, and I'm incorporating the walks into time for me to practice my photography too. I've been letting my fitness slip because I always go gun-ho into the gym and then drop the habit 2-3 weeks later, but by building the simple task of walking 30 minutes a day into my schedule, it will open the possibility to maybe expand it to an hour a day next month. Then, before I know it, I'm dedicating an hour every day to fitness already and I can start incorporating trips to the gym regularly again instead of telling myself I'm too busy. You might think this sounds to slow-paced for you, but if you're thinking that way, then I'll be waiting for you at the finish line because you're already losing.

If you want to try this out, there are people with much more expertise in this subject who have written down a set of suggestions for getting started and keeping it up. I've got a link to one take on it right here.

If you need more motivation, you can pair up with a friend to help each other stick to the habit, and if you're feeling a little ambitious, I don't see anything wrong with incorporating a couple of new habits every month as long as they aren't in the same area of improvement and you measure your success at them every day.

This is all part of a bigger subject, self-improvement, on which I will be writing more shortly.

Until then, let me know in the comments if you think of a good habit to add to your life.

On  the recommendation of Baconhound, I hunted down the Drift Food truck to try one of their legendary sandwiches. I went with the pork belly, almost always a sure thing. The sandwich lived up to the name with a satisfying, but not overwhelming bun, and an excellent combination of ingredients including the pork belly, carrots, cilantro (which was almost completely absent in the flavour) and a sauce of which I don't remember. The star of the sandwich was the pork belly, as it should be, and I loved this sandwich until the final few bites which were a little bit greasy and not as consistent as the rest of the sandwich. As for my formal rating:

Consistency 4 out of 5
Good up until the last few bites, which were a bit greasy and spoiled the aftertaste for me

Cohesion 5 out of 5
Everything in it's place until I finished
 


Texture 5 out of 5
All the ingredients contributed evenly to the sandwich and kept to itself giving the bread excellent crunch, the meet a perfect tenderness and the sauce there but not overwhelming

Flavour 4.5 out of 5
Delicious but not mind-blowing, which was kind of nice actually as they didn't feel the need to over-do it


Overall 4.5 out of 5
A great sandwich on the go, but the added hassle of hunting down the food truck to get one isn't for everyone. Well proportioned and flavourful. Definitely worth trying once, and then again, and again.

So, this is the first post after my decision to diversify this blog. Let's start with some ridiculous and we'll see who's left after the sun rises.

I decided to set a challenge to find the best sandwich in my current city of Edmonton. This is no small task, as it turns out. There are a lot of sandwiches out there. I decided to do this randomly at about 3am one night (this is what happens when you are hungry in the middle of the night), and the hangover is that now I have to follow through. 

The following day I bounded off optimistically into the uncertainty of the Edmonton food scene and took the suggestions of a mysterious fellow on Twitter named "Baconhound" who appears to have a nose for this sort of thing. I picked up my first sandwich and ate it without even considering what really makes a great sandwich (review coming soon). This is a mistake when seeking to find the best of something, and so now forming an idea of "greatness" in a sandwich is the unenviable task with which I find myself.

So to the question then... what makes a great sandwich? I'm not going to research others opinions on this (that sounds far too much like it would make sense, which means it must be dangerous) and instead I'll construct my own rubric for all of the sandwiches to come (and there will be many).

To this, perhaps I am lucky that I have already started on a few sandwiches without a preceding criteria on which to judge their excellence. Much like innovation in a market often comes from an outsider, this has led me to avoid preconceived notions and form properly judgmental ones on my own.

So what do I think makes a great sandwich? Well: consistency, cohesion, texture, and flavour. Is that it? Well it sounds mighty academic. Perhaps I am in trouble after all. Let's see what follows...

Consistency

In my opinion, a sandwich thrives on consistency. I may be alone in this, but I like a sandwich to taste very similar on every single bite. I don't want to be surprised halfway by a sudden change from what was working the last time I chomped down. A little variation is okay and gives a taste of the ingredients in slightly different combinations, but I don't want one bite to be all sauce and the next to be all bread.

Cohesion

As I found with my experiment today with a torta, cohesion is very important in a sandwich. I don't want my sandwich falling apart on me halfway through, scraping the ingredients off the plate. If I wanted that, I would have ordered the ingredients separately.

A surprising number of things have to go right for a sandwich to maintain proper cohesion. Ingredients have to be properly placed, the bread can't get too soggy, and everything has to fit nicely on the bread. I respect cohesion in a sandwich. it takes care, maybe more than any other factor

Texture

I find texture to be another important factor in a sandwich. it can't be too bready, or soggy, or greasy. Ingredients need to be installed in the proper order to maximize satisfaction, and it needs to go together shortly before it is consumed so the ingredients don't mingle too freely and leave things in disarray. The ingredients should mingle, but not meld.

Flavour

Yeah, that's right, with a "u". Welcome to Canada. Come for the open skies, stay for the free healthcare. Flavour might be the single most important part oaf a sandwich, but it is nothing without the rest of this list. I don't think that the flavour of a sandwich should attack your mouth, but it should emerge from all of the properties of the sandwich, and you should be able to tell when an ingredient is missing from that list bite (see consistency). There are a lot of ways to get flavour across in a sandwich, but I have seen some better than others.


So that's my rather high-minded list of attributes on which I'll be judging sandwiches. Did I miss anything? What would you judge a sandwich on? Let me know. Seriously, I'm suspiciously interested in what you have to say. Reviews soon. Come join me on this adventure.

- Mr. S

My inability to sufficiently post in this blog has always bothered me. It's not that I don't want to, it's that I have trouble finding the time to do what I really want to with this space. I've created my own prison of inactivity from overambitious expectations. Checking my Google Analytics just now, it occurs to me that a ton of people still check this blog out, even though I have been a very bad host. So, I am going to make an earnest effort to change that, but it won't be without some basic changes to the rules around here. I'm going to have to do some redecorating.

See, another issue I am constantly at odds with is that I have so many things I want to post about, things that have nothing to do with fashion, and I feel like due to restrictions I have put on myself, this hasn't been the space to post them in, but that's going to change today.

Going forward, I'm going to shift this blog somewhat away from fashion and make it more of a personality blog, which is to say I will post whatever I want to. This will start with my very next post, but I will do my very best to make sure I clearly tag everything in the categories so that you can find what you really want to. Just expect there to be posts on a number of things, ranging across design, technology, productivity and, still, fashion.

That's all for now, but I've already got in my head the next step and it's coming right away. Hell, if I still feel like writing more tonight, I might just do it now... but like a startup company I'm going to pivot and iterate, no longer held by unattainable pretenses about what should and should not be here.

More to come and thanks for sticking with me even though I've been an bit of twit to those regular readers of this space.

- Mr. S