From The Storyteller
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Jan. 13, 2020Hello All: Life has a way of accumulating things including memories and papers. Memories take less space. Enjoy. Doug Stuff “For every year that a person lives in a house we find that they have accumulated roughly 500 to 1000 pounds of stuff” The words direct from the person managing my move from Rockport to Harlingen. I think he was wrong, because each year Elaine collected more pounds of rocks and plants than that. Methodist preachers move fairly often, and were it not for those moves, requiring sorting our stuff as either “keep” or “not keep”, I’m sure we would still have all of it. Why? Because each thing we kept had a story to go with it. The “not keep” stuff usually found its way into garage sales which serves as proof that the old saying, “One man’s junk is another man’s jewelry” is definitely true. Which brings me to shredding papers. While Elaine was collecting rocks and plants, I was hoarding documents. Example: With our last move (2017) I finally parted ways with tax returns that dated back to 1968. Yes, bank statements from years ago found a good home in one of our many file cabinets, along with expired car insurance policies, and checks dating back to 1984. It would be unwise to simply trash the documents with all their sensitive information (e.g. SS#, bank accounts #, etc.), so we bought our first shredder. Which brings me to boredom and back pain. The new shredder did not chew up staples, somethings I had used often, so sorting, un-stapling, and then hand feeding papers into the shredder, six at a time, took almost 100 hours over a seven-day period, even with Elaine’s help. The back pain happened because I purchased a 2ft tall, six at a time, non-staple crunching shredder. Yes, being bent over that shredder for almost 100 hours cured me of document hoarding. Lesson learned. Moral: Some things just aren’t worth keeping. |