The room in which my tiny office space resides was recently repainted, which involved removing a bookshelf. After I replaced it, I realized I didn’t want all that stuff back on it. Including a little pile of journals I’ve kept off and on over the years. I think about getting rid of them, but they’re full of gems.
May 1991: my accelerated Mac SE operates at 20 MHz and has a 105 MB hard drive and a 19″ black and white monitor. Current: 5 year old Mac Mini operating at 2.3 GHz (115 times faster) with 500 GB hard drive (4,876 times greater capacity).
September 1993: my Mac IIsi has 17 MB of RAM. Current: 16 GB (964 times more). That was the computer I used to put together Post Card Passages. Each full-page image required 32 MB, so every time I made a change to an image it switched to virtual memory, and I’d listen to the hard drive chattering for several minutes. Maybe go to the kitchen and brew a fresh pot of coffee.
In a later one, a page bookmarked by a $5 bill from Trinidad and Tobago.
In 1989, I served on the board of the Northwest Association of Book Publishers.
“Special Bylaws. Meeting #3 (or is it 4?) — like doing jury duty. Wrote ‘Another way of looking at Professor X’ afterwards:
A silent moan when X is found
at monthly meetings of our board,
his academics to expound
with functionality ignored.”
I don’t remember who Professor X was.
And going back to the mid 1980s, sketches from Florence, Italy.
This probably from home, Hochheim am Main, West Germany.
So *sigh* guess what has just gone back on the bookshelf
oh cuzzie .. putting our house on the market this spring and trying very hard to discard and going through similar antics (although you are only painting a space). Just saw “Minimalism” which has helped (re)direct some of my thinking, but not much. Just some. Those journals are actually very worth keeping. Look at all the memories that rolled out! You’ll remember the name of prof X, at some odd time. Good luck.
2017 is going to be a crazy time in real estate I think.
Minimalism looks interesting. I tend to travel that way — carryon, 6-8 kilos max. But at home the stuff piles up. Earlier this year I saw one of those “X number of things” challenges, and decided to document everything I own. Oh. My. God.
Two thoughts on decluttering:
1) Long ago in Germany, I had a lot of yearbooks, from designing them two years in prep school, being a yearbook advisor as a teacher, then selling them. I decided they were an albatross, but didn’t want to simply chuck them. So I put them in a box, with a “discard” date a month out. Six weeks later, I had so forgotten about them that I stumbled over the box one night while going for a glass of water. The next day they were gone, and I haven’t missed them. Did see the Hkiss ones when visiting a teacher ten years ago. Fun, but eh.
2) When Clayt died, it became my job to deal with his workshop, which I had known inside and out for forty years. Everything had always been in the same place. So I took everything out, and put every item in a “wrong” place. The next day it was like walking into a stranger’s garage sale, and very easy to sort out what was worth keeping and what not.
Good luck!