Another Pile Shrunken. Another Pile Gone.

Some recent accomplishments on the clutter battlefront:

The shredder!  You've heard all of the paranoia over identity theft.  It's caused some people to be afraid of ever buying something on-line.  I've been buying plenty of stuff on line for years, and never had a problem.  Then again, I take precautions.  I disable cookies for sites I don't know.  I have good anti-virus software.  I run anti-ad-ware programs too.  And I sure don't click on strange links in spam emails to websites I don't know.  But enough about fraud in the on-line world.

Identity theft certainly happens off-line too.  When it's done, it's usually done by professionals who know what they're doing.  Chances are, a shredder won't stop them.  Though it doesn't hurt to have a personal shredder. I probably bought mine at Staples about a year ago.  And it's been sitting in the original box, on the floor of my kitchen.  Just never got around to it.  Well, enough was enough.  I took it out, and found it ridiculously easy to set up and use.  Considering how quick it was to shred a handful of 6 papers, I wonder if I could get rid of all those past bills and stuff in an afternoon.  Hmm.

The Pile-By-The-Desk.  Sitting next to my computer desk has been a pile, taking some shape or another since I moved into this place 7 years ago.  This included a box underneath a DVD player underneath a book underneath a scanner underneath stuff I shouldn't be putting on top of the scanner.  There were other things piled around too: cheat sheets to games I haven't played in over a year, a USB game controller that Itotally forgot I had, a Pinnacle A/V input that collected lost of dust, the pre-amp I use for recording my radio show, and other scary oddities.  Makes me wish I took a "before" photo, because now in its place is a single multi-shelf bookend with the important stuff on it (including the scanner on its own shelf, with nothing resting on top of it).

What was in the box?  More school papers.  I moved these up to the little storage unit I have.

The Storage Unit.  In the top floor of my apartment building, there are several big cubbyholes of sorts.  You can think of them as huge wooden cabinets, with a latch and padlock.  Each tenet has one.  After cleaning out a lot of stuff from last year, the only thing I have left in there now is my hiking backpack from by Boy Scout days, and the ol' school papers. 

As you long-time readers of the blog might remember me saying, I still own every saved scrap of paper from high school, college and graduate school.  I have faced the hard fact that I'm never going to really use the stuff, or at least have any interest in reading any large percentage of it.  But it's hard to just simply toss it, because it is after all the output of much hard pencil-pushing, studying, and tuition money. I have thought of up some solutions, and mentioned them before.  I've got to get rid of it, but not without a ritualistic way or a photo session.  We'll see.

One last thing I did find upstairs though was an old poster I made in college for a contest.  We were having a poster contest for Math Awareness Week (yes, there is such a thing, and believe it or not the website for that year is still up).  I won first prize for this poster on my favorite casino game, roulette. Along with a layout of the table that used all the correct colors, I also included a little explanation about the game and basically how there's no secret mathematical system for winning it, and why (although it doesn't stop people from trying or swearing that they have a working system of course).

Great display.  Or at least, it was when it was new.  Now the thing was bent, warped, and falling to pieces.  The solution: take a photo, then throw away the original piece.  And in this day an age of affordable 7+ megapixel cameras, it's easy enough to snap a photo that's big enough to zoom in on and READ small text if you so desire.  Problem solved!

One last thing about store.  I've said this before, but it bears repeating.  The solution to a packrat problem is not "get storage".  Now for some people, namely people who have seasonal stuff to move back and forth a couple of times a year, storage is a good idea.  But, I'm not really one of those people.  But storage does not solve the problem of getting rid of stuff you don't use.  You're just paying to HIDE the stuff.  And if you don't cut off the behavior at the source, you'll just end up filling up the remaining spaces anyway.  Fortunately, I don't have to pay anything extra for this external closet of mine.  But it's probably time to get rid of what's in there, to make way for stuff that makes for better storage.