Afternoon delight…
Posted by bbc on 18 Jul 2007 | Tagged as: musings
It’s unaccountably rainy today in Portland. I know, I know – people think it always rains in Oregon but in reality it rarely rains in July and August. When I moved out here, it came as a total shock to me that I had to water the grass in the summer. On the east coast we had enough summer thunderstorms to avoid watering every day.
But the dreary weather is good because I have more of those indoor sorting chores that I keep starting and then not quite finishing. Mostly it’s stuff that isn’t a lot of fun to sort and dispose of one way or another, so I’m in no big hurry to do it. Other things, even writing and work, seem more enticing.
Today’s chore is shredding. In truth, because I only have a small shredder, I can’t do this for very long or it overheats. I can just imagine dashing out onto the balcony with a blazing shredder in an attempt to let the rain put the fire out. I don’t want to do it for very long either, so that works out nicely. Probably I could bundle all this stuff up and take it to an industrial shredding place – but I’m looking through it at the same time. I doubt that I really even need to shred some of it – these documents are too old to even be useful as identify theft fodder. But they are financial or legal or medical – all categories that could have tempting information in them.
Some of them would even be quite fun to use if I were going to write my memoirs (which I’m certainly not). Copies of paper checks are interesting – one of those things we’ve lost to electronic recordkeeping. I’m surprised to see just how much money I spent on automobile related issues – tires, gas, repair shops, insurance, payments. The price of gas was really low, but all of those other things made a substantial dent in my bank balance. I don’t spend nearly that proportion of my income on automobiles now – but other things have taken over that space. Computers and the associated parts and gadgets are the black holes of the budget these days.
I used to be very organized about making entries on the checks to explain what they were for. Lots of the ones made out to Cash have some notation about exactly where the cash went. And then there’s the check, made out to a person whose name I vaguely recall but can’t quite place, with a notation on the “for” line that says “Happiness.” I don’t know what that was. It could have been a book or a record or any number of things (because we all know you can’t actually buy happiness). Or it could have had some special meaning. Clearly it would help if I could remember who that person was. I do know it wasn’t someone I was in love with – my memory isn’t that vague. And if I really bought happiness that day, what did I do with it?
Enough of metaphysical mysteries and back to cleanup. Something about the small mounds of shredded paper is appealing. There’s a certain sense of satisfaction in reducing a filing box of paper to shredded dust. Looking at one of the bags of shredded material, I’m struck by the idea that I could use it to stuff pillows (after all, I buy filler to go in those pillows). The drill sergeant in my head who seems to be driving some of this cleanup says absolutely not. But you never know when you could use a nice bag of fill…
My desk was behind this column.