Some more crazy things I found in my enormous pile on my bureau. I think cataloging this stuff has taken longer than getting rid of it! Oh well, that's why I have a blog.
- Broken triangle. If you look in the stationary aisle of any drug store, you'll usually find a set of drawing triangles. Namely, you'll see a 30-60-90 triangle and a 45-45-90 triangle, sometimes packed with a straight ruler and a compass. This is one of the 30-60-90 ones, and it has some history. It came in a plastic case with some similar drawing tools, which I got sometime when I was in 6th or 7th grade. I started using the case as a general pencil case. I'm sure at some point I threw out the case, but the original contents are probably lingering around.
I managed to hang on to this fragile triangle without breaking it. At least, until recently. I saw that one of the coners was broken off, and I'm pretty sure that happened in recent years.
In these past 25+ years, have I EVER used it? Not that I can remember. Does ANYBODY ever use these things? Well I went to college for math, and I sure didn't use it for any of those classes. My wife and I however had a friend whose 11 year-old son wanted to serious get into drawing, and one of the comic-drawing drawing books we gave him mentioned all of the tools you should have: kneaded eraser, T-square, and so on, including the triangles. So I was carring this triangle in my pocket and was waiting to give it to him. Well, to make a long story sort, we're not associating with the mother any mre. If the kid needs a triangle, he doesn't need a broken one. Into the trash you go, triangle.
- Business cards, business cards, business cards! These never diappear completely, do they? Here are some examples of what I found:
- A local music store who has since moved to a new location. No need for this card.
- Business card for a Vietnamese restaurant. My wife and I lifed this place, but they're out of the way, and the only reason we went in the first place is because we got a Restaurant.com coupon for them, and they're no longer taking them. Time to throw this out.
- Appointment cards. You know how they give these to you when you go to the dentist, the doctor, a massage therapist, etc? Do you still hang on to these after the appointment is long over? There's no need to. If this is a place you go back to, you'll have their number elsewhere, or have future visits already written in your calendar. Or even if you don't, they'll typically call you to give you a reminder. I AM however glad I took a quick glance at these before I tossed them. A while back I had an optometrist tell me I had "lattice degeneration", as she wrote on the card. Good to know the name of it!
- Paper print-outs. Several things printed out from the computer, which I don't really need now as a print-out:
- Printed emails from a friend regarding a project we wanted to do. Well, we still haven't done it. I really don't know at this point if I'll ever get him to collaborate on something! Besides, I have the emails still saved on-line. So I can ditch this.
- Likewise, a couple of math problems I was working on. I may visit these in the future, so I put them in my "math" folder on my computer, and got rid of the paper.
- Printed, edited list from Wikipedia. And I can go back there to look it up again. No need for the paper, even if it was a help back at that time I printed it.
- Job description for a position I was going for in my last company, but couldn't get. I sure don't need a reminder for it.
- Old Job vs. New Job comparison. I changed jobs recently. It was a really difficult choice to make, and I was weighing my options. So naturally I made a list to get my thoughts written down. But what's done is done. Time to ditch this.
