What to do with stuff?
I had to come back to work today. Boo hoo. I wasn’t ready.
At home I am still going through my stuff. My goodness! I don’t seem to have made as much progress as I might have liked, but there have been several trips to the recycling bin. Do you know, I think I had kept every single mobile phone bill I ever received? These days I don’t even get paper mobile phone bills. I thought for a few seconds that it might be interesting to look back and see who I was calling ten years ago. Then I thought, ‘no’, and upended that entire file into the bin pile. Same goes for bank statements. I had years of them. I tore them all up. I also had all the raw data sheets from my Honours thesis in the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet. I looked at them and reminisced on all those days I spent walking about the hills at Wallaby Creek recording the behaviour of kangaroos. Then I binned those too.
One of the oldest things I found is a little pink scented autograph book from 1985, stuffed up the back of my desk drawer. I think this has missed several clean outs. Boy is it silly. It’s full of the very silliest little schoolyard autograph-book-type rhymes. They are not even funny, after a childhood silly kind of funny; they are just plain silly. Even my intelligent best friend Pam, who later came first in 3 Unit English, was silly. I don’t think it’s worth keeping.
I also found a whole lot of white cards with a crimped gold edge, on which I had written little verses and quotes to put up on this little gold stand. There’s a whole lot of Elisabeth Elliot in there, and there’s a good sprinkling of Don Carson too.
One thing I haven’t worked out what to do with yet is conference booklets. You know, you go on these Christian conferences and you get this whole booklet in which you take a few notes. So you keep it. But a person, or maybe a conference junkie, can end up with a lot of those booklets. What do other people do with theirs? (I know I could scan them, but the thought of sitting down to do that makes me groan.)