So in preparation for the fall yard sale I've been going over the garage (and today, up into the attic) and working on cleaning out what was left in boxes from when we first moved in, almost 8 years ago. I've been a lot harsher in making the keep/discard choice, and have put a lot of stuff into the "to be sold" pile (or outright trashed). Up on the block will be a whole stack of books (the first time I've really culled the stacks of books in, well, forever), plus a bunch of other assorted stuff (including my copy of the board games Careers, Civil War and NATO: The Next War in Europe). A large part of the "trash" pile includes pretty much all of the tchotchkes that I collected at my first two professional conferences (LISA '99 and a SANS conference from around that time frame as well).
On the one hand, it feels good to be getting rid of a lot of things that quite honestly I'm just never going to actually look at or use in any meaningful way — at most, I'd look at it as I'm hunting for something else, have a fleeting hit of nostalgia and then quickly forget it as I moved on. On the gripping hand, however, I can't help but feel like I'm almost turning my back on a big chunk of myself. I would spend hours over the summer, playing all sides of a game like Pax Brit and talking with Adam on the phone for hours, analyzing positions and moves and planning out the future courses of the game. I wonder if I should accept that we now live in a digital age and put my old encyclopedias out to get rid of all that dead weight, or if I should keep them and put them back on the shelves in a few years in the hopes that my kids find them the way I found my parents' set, and spend hours grabbing volumes and looking up and reading about whatever happens to strike their fancy.
I know that there's more that I could be getting rid of — several binders of baseball cards, in various states of completion springs immediately to mind, the acoustic guitar that I bought but never actually learned to play. We'll see how much more makes its way onto the pile (or into a trash bag) as I keep going through things.
I know that there's more that I could be getting rid of — several binders of baseball cards, in various states of completion springs immediately to mind, the acoustic guitar that I bought but never actually learned to play. We'll see how much more makes its way onto the pile (or into a trash bag) as I keep going through things.
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