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For the last several weeks I’ve been doing a gradual purge and cleaning of my refrigerator and freezer. I really need a better system than memory for the identification of the contents of freezer containers. Especially after four or five years. Was that leftover spaghetti sauce? Oxtail soup? Ah, no, it’s medlar pulp. How about...right. Red wine ice cubes. (From half-used bottles, useful for small cooking amounts.) And yes, the baggies of portioned cooked spinach are easy enough to figure out. But...so that’s what freeze dried garlic cloves look like! Dinners are going to be interesting this month. The refrigerator was a bit easier though I’m still amazed how assorted home made jams and jellies seem to accumulate much faster than I use them.
2018/07/14 10:30
Hmm, so evidently "the contractor window is 9-12" means "the contractor will show up to start work sometime between 9-12...probably closer to 12." This is, at least, better than "the contractor will show up to do the estimate at 8am" meaning "the contractor will ring your doorbell at 7:30am when you are still in your nightgown and sitting on the can."
2018/07/14 13:00
The lovely guys from Lamps Plus installed the ceiling lights in my library. Now I’m inspired to organize the library closet which will remove a bunch of the bankers boxes from the great room. Dreading the task of going through boxes with old financial records and correspondence. Especially now that I’ve gone all paperless for the financial stuff I’m tempted to shred the entirety of the old stuff. Pondering the likelihood that anyone at any point would find value in the paper letters I accumulated back when one did such a thing.
2018/07/14 22:20
Progress! The library closet is...well, more organized. At the cost of having a large quantity of miscellaneous stuff sitting in a heap on the library floor waiting to be sorted through. The closet has shelves that hold the remaining stock of assorted SCA & Filk publication projects (which have already been written off on my taxes as obsolete and discarded). I should make them available as freebies in appropriate contexts to protect my conscience from simply trashing them.
This is things like: the original paper edition of The History of the West Kingdom, my irregularly-annual medieval Welsh history journal "Y Camamseriad"; the remaining copies of my song collection "Songbook Pusher" as well as remaindered copies of the two filk collections I co-published with Wail Songs. Also all manner of handouts for SCA classes I taught.
The closet also holds old computer-related equipment and supplies that need to be gone through for obsolescence. There's a lot of obsolescence lying around in heaps. An assortment of various types and grades of printer paper. Do you know how long it's been since I actually printed something on my home printer? I don't even use the scanner function of the printer because I can get better resolution just by taking a picture of the document with my phone.
Back in Junior High, we were assigned to read Alvin Toffler's "Future Shock". Toffler had no fucking clue. I turn around and the things I used to rely on to manage my life have become utterly obsolete. And they've been replaced by better things! I have wholeheartedly embraced the concept of living a paperless life to the extent possible. (Except for books. You can pry my books from my cold dead fingers.) But now I'm left staring at heaps and boxes of paper (and the equipment for managing paper) and I'm paralyzed by the inability to simply move on.
I will though. I'm going to double-check the record-retention recommendations for personal financial paperwork, scan a few essential items (I've already done that for all my past tax returns), and then find a local secure shredding service. I'll keep the letters, though I may trash the bundles of old Christmas Cards. I can let go of Christmas Cards.
I'm dealing with 7 bankers boxes of photocopied journal articles and book excerpts by throwing some money at a teenager to whom I'm loaning my old Mac and sheet feeding scanner. The theory is that I'll receive the computer back with a folder full of pdfs with file names filled in on the bibliography spreadsheet. At that point, even if I never look at any of the articles again, I'll be content to recycle the paper copies. And I actually do use those articles for research. It was one of the first projects I tackled for the Lesbian Historic Motif Project. The vast majority, though are linguistics, Welsh history, and clothing & textiles. I really do intend to pull in a bunch of the Welsh history research in my fiction. (I've been noodling with the 10th century "Viking girl kidnaps Welsh princess" story lately.) I think the moment when I might have done something serious with the surviving garments database has passed, though. It was one of those projects that tickled my data-cataloging fancy, but hit a point where it was not complete enough to really go public in a big way, but too big to be happy about walking away from. Such is life.
I have too much life for one lifetime. And I've reached the age for pruning branches away so that the remaining fruit will ripen properly. And it breaks my heart sometimes.
