There’s a new Van Winkle set to hit in May.  That poor child’s room is far from ready.  This will keep me focused on getting more junk out the door.  Plus, there is still so much to be desired when it comes to the garage.  Oh, well – onward and upward…

I won’t go day by day, but the last few nights have seen the following:

1. Elimination of all the floppy disks I could find.  I was shocked at how many I had.  Some of them went back to the early 90’s!  I copied everything off that seemed of interest and tossed them.
2. Tossing out some old cables.  Most of them were actually old coaxial TV cables.  I don’t know why I kept them, but I did.  It’s so sad.  My wife must love me to put up with me keeping junk like that “just in case”.  Anyway, they are gone
3. I went through Several CD’s that I had.  Many of them were old software packages and such.  I tossed those, saved the blank ones, put all the ones containing pictures in cases and kept a few others for now (the sad part is, I still have more to go through.
4. I gave away printer cartrages for a printer that was stolen from our house a while back (another fun and exciting story)
5. I gave away a wireless card that is no longer needed.

Tonight (day 9) it’s a second round of media cleansing.  I found more CDs and floppies in the pile.  I’m starting to think the darn things are having kinky media love in the basket they were in and producing new little disks and such – just to make this last longer.  Alas, it is what it is and I have to get back to work…

Huge stack of mail and papers that accumulated on the desk

That’s about as exciting as reading a piece of proposed legislation – minus the aneurysm most likely brought on by such an activity.  Still, the exercise seemed to be fairly productive as represented by the following photo of the bin full of paper

I am ashamed that, in the process, I managed to break the shredder in new and glorious ways.  Heaven knows if I’ll be able to undo that mess.  Oh well, it’s still progress.  Every little bit helps and I still hope to have removed a lot of clutter and stuff from my life at the end of this 30 days.

On a side note, forcing myself to go through all these papers caused me to start pulling together all the papers from 2008 so I am ready for taxes (as soon as I get my @#$! W2).  See, I’ve already started my folder:

Woo Hoo! Tax stuff!

Ok, now I’ve brought up taxes.  That tends to get the budding libertarian ( political ideology – not specifically the party) bent out of shape.  I just read the wonderful piece of caca that is the current “stimulus bill”, and I can only say that it’s not impressing me (except for comedic value), but all that, I’m afraid is a conversation for another day and time.

Back to the task at hand, we’ll put another check mark on the chart for my 30 day downsizing of stuff.  (Yippee!)  I’m still going to tackle that basket full of junk that is mostly trash, but not tonight.  I believe I’m tired.  More tomorrow….

3 – 1Gig memory sticks that came out of a MacBook Pro and an iMac.

I still have to ultimately find a new home for these three wayward lilttle memory sticks, but we’ll still put a check mark on day two and start working on tomorrow’s goodies.

This post has turned out very lame, but oh well, so far so good on the mission(s).  I’ll try to do better tomorrow – both in getting rid of crap and doing a write up on it.

I have to go finish some details on pinewood derby cars – more to come.

Anywho, I’m sure your wrought with anticipation and glee over this.  Awesome!  Glad to hear it.  “Let’s start at the very beginning…A very good place to start”

Day 1

Old Bedding and a bag of Christmas stuff we didn’t use this year

Thrilling – isn’t it?  Please do control yourselves.

1.  The bedding.
I’ve been meaning to get rid of this for ever.  We ousted and old double bed of ours some time ago.  That, in itself was a comedy of errors.  We took the bed down, tried to take the mattress to a charity after hauling the heavy $@#! thing down the stairs, charity doesn’t take that particular item, put heavy $@#! back into garage to dispose of later, put heavy $@#! thing back upstairs a few days later when we took on Hurricane Ike refugees (mom and step-dad) and finally hauled off again to someones house that was getting bulk trash pickup that week.  Somehow, in all of this goodness, I never got rid of the old bedding.  Well, problem solved.  Sins forgiven.  (That one at least.  Who knows what I’ll have to do to repent for that beast of a comma spliced sentence above)

2.  The Christmas stuff
Not Xmas stuff, mind you – the real deal.  We have a LOT of this stuff. We were working on our own collection and then inherited a bunch too.  My late stepmother (God rest her soul) loved the holiday.  She had quite the collection of it.  When she passed, and my dad was moving to Las Vegas, he sent it all our way.  We use most of it to this day (I’ll have to talk about the tree some day and what it means to my Christmas preperations some other time).  Some stuff, however, just doesn’t make the cut, and while not as heavy as the $@#! mattress, it is kind of silly to haul it up and down from the attic every year for it to sit in the garage.  I’m sure this one be the last time in our lives, but this year (or is it last now?), we bagged some of it up and off it went too.

Whew!  I’m glad that is over.

Who got it you asked?  Our friendly neighborhood Goodwill.

So, where do we go from here?  Well, I’m not quite sure.  I have 29 more days to figure out other stuff to purge.  I have a couple ideas at this point, but I’m sure I’ll be managing most of this by the seat of my pants.  (I know at least one beautiful lady that will probably tell you I do more of that than I should )  Some of it I’ll give away, other items I’ll probably try and sell and plenty of it, I’ll toss.  All of if, I hope at least, I’ll chronical here.  I know you can’t wait.  Tune in tomorrow for our the next installment of our hero’s quest to get rid of some $@#! stuff!

(I hear a Mommy and a little girl disagreeing over bed time.  I have to go help resolve that for now)