whee!

Our furnace died some time in the night. It's -18°C outside right now (0°F). melted_snowball has stayed home to intercept the repair people, who should arrive within the half-hour. Fortunate thing, that, since it's around 16°C in the house.

Meanwhile, I have a minor head-cold. But I'm at work, and feeling fairly OK.

surprising bursts of productivity

Today is going OK; I think I'm less sick than yesterday. But perhaps I should get sick more often- my den is much more organized now.

I came home after lunch yesterday because I was fuzzy-headed and everything I had to do at work required concentration. I tried to nap but the Sudafed made me jittery, so instead I started in on cleaning my desk.

By 5:30, I had:

- gone through all my debit receipts and found the health-insurance reimbursables
- sorted all the stacks of paper on my desk and made new folders for the things that needed it
- printed labels for all the folders that needed them (a la Getting Things Done)
- found room for the folders I had sitting on the desk, under the desk, and on the floor
- tossed a thick stack of paperwork I know I'll never need or want
- sorted through half of the old files and either tossed or refiled the categories I had made over a decade ago that don't make sense any more ("Personal records" is my favourite bad category- it included school grades, medical records, and letters excoriating credit-card companies. Ideally, my new categories will make sense when I'm well, or six months from now.)

By the time I went to bed at 9:30, I had:

- removed the last cable-clutter from my desk, by moving the USB hub off to under the desk.
- tossed more old paperwork
- taken down a few old photos and figured out what I wanted to replace them with (mostly).
- framed my favourite magazine cover to bring into work

I don't know where that burst of clutter-reducing energy came from, but I'll take it. Yay clutter reduction!

Thoughts on mementos

Yesterday when I was sorting through papers in a Sudafed haze, I took a few moments to re-read some of the letters I sent when I was in school. The most fun one was a pissed-off letter to Chase Bank on the resolution of a credit-report mistake, but it was also fun to find the letter I sent Cornell's library asking forgiveness concerning fees to replace two books which were stolen from my dad's truck on a trip to NYC (the fines were waived).

dawn_guy pointed me at unclutterer, which has a recent article, What does it mean to ‘honor’ mementos?

This is an interesting and relevant question for me. I would like to do something with my crate of letters, cards and other paper mementos. I like the idea of browsing them every once in a while; and a crate is not really the most suitable way to browse them without damaging them. Scrapbooking is a scarily-obsessive hobby, or at least it is rather dominated by people who seems obsessively scary. (Also, would I sort theatre and concert tickets into a binder of their own, or mix them in with other ephemera by date?... Such questions to obsess over! I just don't have time!)

Perhaps there's a digital form of preservation that doesn't feel time-wasting or obsessive. I haven't come to any conclusions here, but I'm curious if this is something you've come to peace with.

melted_snowball is much less sentimental than I am. And I'm sentimental about a wider range of stuff. Neither of us are "right" and I don't think we're incompatibly different about this. But it does seem to come to a head with magazines from *mumble* months ago that I've not gotten around to reading and electronics I might fix.

I just unsubscribed from Linux Journal (for a few reasons- including the fact that they run terrible sexist ads, but also because I haven't really read any of the last six issues). I've tossed the tape-eating VCR that was sitting in the closet. d. was, I think rightfully, a bit miffed that I had kept it around. If you knew his father moved 800 boxes of stuff from Cortland to Long Island, including boxes they hadn't opened in over 20 years, you'd probably see his point. And I do.

And it is quite gratifying to lighten the load, especially if it includes truly accepting my limitations. ("I'll never be good enough at micro-soldering to fix that headphone cable satisfactorily. And that's OK.")

A few years ago I tossed the crushed pair of black crushed velvet high heel pumps that were given to me by my friend Arlene for my first time to see the live stage show of Rocky Horror at Risley Hall at Cornell. Partly I wish I'd kept the shoes, even though they looked awful. Or, maybe that's really a feeling of regret I'd not treated them better.