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Decluttering memories
Apr. 28th, 2023 07:58 amLast night, I watched most of the DVD that came with the food processor with my daughter. I didn’t have a good reason for doing this. What I had was a Thing that I had stumbled across when looking for a different Thing, and doing some decluttering along the way. I figured the DVD might be a pretty funny thing to poke fun at, but it actually was a decent video manual and the people who put it together put some real thought into showing how to do things that people might really use the food processor for. This morning, I searched for and found the YouTube videos (2) that have the same content. I may or may not watch the rest of the DVD (I think it’s just the cookies and the cinnamon rolls at this point, but am not really sure). If A. wants to, we probably will, because it is Low Key Fun, and she’s presumably getting a little overview of some basic cooking and that’s not a bad thing and who knows, maybe I’ll pick up another trick or two.
Looking for the dishwasher manual made me painfully aware of how many different places I have user manuals stored. Watching the DVD from the food processor made me painfully aware of how little point there is to keeping any/all of this paperwork. I mean, either read/watch it or don’t, but keeping it around is a bunch of foolishness. On the other hand, it was hard enough to declutter the user manuals in the file in the metal filing cabinet with R. I had to talk through each piece of paper — well, we’re not filing the warranty paperwork now, are we (I never do anyway), etc. So I got to thinking about the question: “Where would you look for it?” And the path I looked for kitchen related stuff was very clear — first in the kitchen, then the shelves by my chair, then my office, then the 3rd floor filing cabinet, finally the metal filing cabinet. But a lot of this stuff is actually in the metal filing cabinet, and that was, literally, the _fifth_ _place_. Clearly wrong. The metal filing cabinet is _mostly_ empty. It really ought to be completely empty of anything that has anything to do with me at all.
I figured the easiest way to fix this problem is to collect it all in one spot, throw away all but a tiny fraction of it, and then store it in a non-offensive way on the permanent shelving unit in the eat-in. For those following along, this shelving unit recently acquired a bunch of stuff from the bookcase across from it (that moved down here from the upstairs hall when the treadmill moved out of my office in 2020. Whew). The bookcase is exiting probably on Monday, but fairly soon one way or another. Anyway. The shelving unit is a bit wedged. Not disastrously so, but a bit.
So today, I went over to where a bunch of calendars are shelved and pulled them down to figure out whether to keep any and if so which. I extracted one piece of information that seemed moderately useful to keep track of (I ripped out the page of the calendar in question, circled it, and put it in my daughter’s memory box), tossed a couple calendars immediately, lined up a couple planners to be guillotined so the paper could be recycled, and ordered 9 other calendars by year, contemplated them briefly, and put them in the basement to age for a bit longer before deciding whether to pitch, cold store, convert to digital format or Other. It is almost certainly going to be throw away, which is why I’m not doing anything else with it in the meantime, and I put it next to the boxes of schoolwork that are similarly aging. I go through those occasionally and reduce them in volume.
That’s opened up enough space on the shelf that I think I can get the user manuals (post-purging) into the space in some kind of accordion file or similar. If it’s not, I’ll probably get rid of the stampers and maybe some other crafts.
The one date I didn’t want to lose track of resulted in me looking at that entry in this blog (I didn’t put the thing I don’t want to forget on this blog for Reasons). And looking at that entry made me chuckle sadly. It was in the middle of September in 2020, and I was feeling pissy because people wanted to plan holidays and I didn’t trust anyone not to cancel. Also, I was feeling pissy because everyone was trying to tell me the house we were planning to build in Northhampton would be done sooner than my projected completion date. FWIW, at that point in time, I was aiming for the end of 2022. Here is it well into Spring 2023, and we have not yet broken ground.
I am just not surprised about any of this.
ETA:
Other things found in the eat-in shelving unit:
2 boxes cheap Valentine’s cards (kiddie type), containing partial contents from what looks conservatively like _all_ the cheap valentine’s cards I ever bought. Like, the leftovers from every year, consolidated. Wow. I remember doing this. We may have even made use of leftovers from several years. Once. And then later elementary de-emphasized it and finally, 6th grade was virtual.
Dry-erase style chore charts. One carefully colored in by A. using pink and purple in a moderately aesthetic pattern. Neither have ever been meaningfully used for their intended purpose
More user manuals, which is fine, all for kitchen equipment. But some for kitchen equipment we have donated, and some warranty paperwork. I’m currently consolidating all the user manuals from all sources into a bin. I’m thinking about reading the InstantPot user manual and tracking down a video manual for it. R. uses it a lot more than I do, and I would really _like_ to use it more often, because I’m pretty sure that I would cook beans more often if I used the InstantPot more.
Looking for the dishwasher manual made me painfully aware of how many different places I have user manuals stored. Watching the DVD from the food processor made me painfully aware of how little point there is to keeping any/all of this paperwork. I mean, either read/watch it or don’t, but keeping it around is a bunch of foolishness. On the other hand, it was hard enough to declutter the user manuals in the file in the metal filing cabinet with R. I had to talk through each piece of paper — well, we’re not filing the warranty paperwork now, are we (I never do anyway), etc. So I got to thinking about the question: “Where would you look for it?” And the path I looked for kitchen related stuff was very clear — first in the kitchen, then the shelves by my chair, then my office, then the 3rd floor filing cabinet, finally the metal filing cabinet. But a lot of this stuff is actually in the metal filing cabinet, and that was, literally, the _fifth_ _place_. Clearly wrong. The metal filing cabinet is _mostly_ empty. It really ought to be completely empty of anything that has anything to do with me at all.
I figured the easiest way to fix this problem is to collect it all in one spot, throw away all but a tiny fraction of it, and then store it in a non-offensive way on the permanent shelving unit in the eat-in. For those following along, this shelving unit recently acquired a bunch of stuff from the bookcase across from it (that moved down here from the upstairs hall when the treadmill moved out of my office in 2020. Whew). The bookcase is exiting probably on Monday, but fairly soon one way or another. Anyway. The shelving unit is a bit wedged. Not disastrously so, but a bit.
So today, I went over to where a bunch of calendars are shelved and pulled them down to figure out whether to keep any and if so which. I extracted one piece of information that seemed moderately useful to keep track of (I ripped out the page of the calendar in question, circled it, and put it in my daughter’s memory box), tossed a couple calendars immediately, lined up a couple planners to be guillotined so the paper could be recycled, and ordered 9 other calendars by year, contemplated them briefly, and put them in the basement to age for a bit longer before deciding whether to pitch, cold store, convert to digital format or Other. It is almost certainly going to be throw away, which is why I’m not doing anything else with it in the meantime, and I put it next to the boxes of schoolwork that are similarly aging. I go through those occasionally and reduce them in volume.
That’s opened up enough space on the shelf that I think I can get the user manuals (post-purging) into the space in some kind of accordion file or similar. If it’s not, I’ll probably get rid of the stampers and maybe some other crafts.
The one date I didn’t want to lose track of resulted in me looking at that entry in this blog (I didn’t put the thing I don’t want to forget on this blog for Reasons). And looking at that entry made me chuckle sadly. It was in the middle of September in 2020, and I was feeling pissy because people wanted to plan holidays and I didn’t trust anyone not to cancel. Also, I was feeling pissy because everyone was trying to tell me the house we were planning to build in Northhampton would be done sooner than my projected completion date. FWIW, at that point in time, I was aiming for the end of 2022. Here is it well into Spring 2023, and we have not yet broken ground.
I am just not surprised about any of this.
ETA:
Other things found in the eat-in shelving unit:
2 boxes cheap Valentine’s cards (kiddie type), containing partial contents from what looks conservatively like _all_ the cheap valentine’s cards I ever bought. Like, the leftovers from every year, consolidated. Wow. I remember doing this. We may have even made use of leftovers from several years. Once. And then later elementary de-emphasized it and finally, 6th grade was virtual.
Dry-erase style chore charts. One carefully colored in by A. using pink and purple in a moderately aesthetic pattern. Neither have ever been meaningfully used for their intended purpose
More user manuals, which is fine, all for kitchen equipment. But some for kitchen equipment we have donated, and some warranty paperwork. I’m currently consolidating all the user manuals from all sources into a bin. I’m thinking about reading the InstantPot user manual and tracking down a video manual for it. R. uses it a lot more than I do, and I would really _like_ to use it more often, because I’m pretty sure that I would cook beans more often if I used the InstantPot more.