A journey through my junk: happy Down the Rabbit Hole day!
I don't normally write much about my personal life here, partly because I'm pretty jealous of my privacy and partly because it's just not the kind of thing we do here (but that's the point of Rabbit Hole day, of course!).
Last November, Alice and I had our big, grand wedding in Toronto, and invited all my friends. Now, I haven't lived in Toronto for nearly ten years, but for most of that time, I've had a storage locker there, filled with the memories of the three decades I spent in the town of my birth before I left, first for California, then for the UK, then for California, then for the UK again. I've delved into the locker on three occasions, attempting to figure out what I had in it and what I was going to do with it all. The first time, I confronted the incredible, jammed-together mountain of junk and boxes, opened a few, and gave up (it didn't help that the rest of my family had filled all the remaining spaces with their unloved junk). The second time, I showed up with more resolve: I was going to sort through everygoddamnedthing and figure out what I was shipping to London, what I was giving away, what was headed for the dumpster and what needed to be shredded.
That was last spring, when we went back to Toronto with the baby for her first visit to meet her Canadian family, over Passover week. I spent a dusty afternoon, opening boxes, looking through them, sorting them into piles and putting them back together. It was an incredibly emotional experience. The boxes hadn't been packed very intelligently: years before, I'd come back to the warehouse loft I'd shared with my ex, and stuck all the junk I thought I couldn't part with in boxes. It was miserable. The stuff was filthy, and there was so much emotion in this stuff, which felt more like the wreckage of a past life than the memories thereof, that I just lost the capacity to be careful and discriminating, and by the end of it, I had some 80 boxes of random and assorted crapola that disappeared into the locker for most of a decade before I saw it again.
There were enormous piles of books, of course. I'd worked in libraries and bookstores from the age of 12 to the age of 23, and I'd amassed some 10,000 of the little wooden bastards. I had previously believed that these books were my identity, that you could know a man by the books he kept, that I'd be able to read their spines and find in them a palimpsest of all the people I'd been on the way to becoming the person I was. But once I'd been separated from them, I discovered that I barely missed them. Now and again, I'd need to reference something in one of them and I'd find it on Amazon, usually for less than a buck. The books went to my brother's school, where they've been integrated into the school library. Books should be read, not stored, and there's plenty there to make normal kids into happy mutants.
There were boxes of cassettes and VHS cassettes, including a trove of fantastic mixtapes that I'd exchanged with friends and as a courtship ritual over the years. Ten years before, I'd been unable to part with them. Now, it was easy: off to the thriftstore with them. I can download that stuff whenever I need it.
There were boxes of t-shirts, and these, weirdly enough, were harder to get rid of. I find myself sentimentally attached to a shocking quantity of tees. The Rocky Horror tee I wore every Friday for years to the Roxy theater in Toronto. The shirt from Grindstone Island is part of a small trove of memorabilia I have from the place (including a hammered-together chest made from old fruit boxes, and a complete run of WHOLE EARTH CATALOGs) that, to this day, is the place that I think of when I want to imagine perfect peace and happiness. Sometimes, I wonder if my life peaked at 17, there on a 12-acre island in the middle of Big Rideau Lake, listening to the loons and swinging in the hammock on Moonwatcher's Point, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and talking all night long.
There was some art, and a few wardrobe pieces from my teens and twenties, including my beat up old punk leather jacked, covered in chains, worn to shreds, with stencils on the back. Maybe Poesy will wear it someday. Angry leather jackets never really go out of style.
There were my files -- all my juvenilia, the stories I wrote in elementary school and high school (including Tommy the Toenail Tarantula, with some damned good illustrations by Toby Muller -- where are you these days, Toby?). A truly fantastic quantity of photocopied material about Disney World. A thick folder of anti-fascist material from the John Brown/Anti-KKK League in San Francisco, whom I used to send away to for stickers, fliers and other material. And correspondence -- all the letters and postcards, the lovenotes and snapshots.
The snapshots deserve their own paragraph. One thing I realized: I dressed a lot better in my teens than in my twenties. Partly that was the fact that teenagers can get away with some pretty daring fashion. Partly it was that I spent my twenties trying to figure out what someone who had suddenly found himself working real jobs for real money wore (I went from working for tiny wages in a bookstore to doing Internet work that paid as much as my parents earned pretty much overnight, somewhere around 1993). Partly it was that I gained a ton of weight when I was about 23, and kept it on until I was about 32 and I discovered Atkins.
Another thing I realized: the girls I dated in my teens were knockouts, absolutely out of my league. And not just me, either. When I look at the photos of all my pals in their couples, the teenaged boys look lumpy or gangly, unfinished, with bad facial hair (shocking realization du jour: I look terrible with giant sideburns). The girls, by contrast, look pretty much fantastic. They're put together, confident, striking. All the couples look like beauty and the beast.
What else was there? A complete set of original Star Trek action figures and an Enterprise playset with the cool-ass transporter/spinner thing. The original, absolutely fabulous Haunted Mansion board game. A pretty good selection of Disney-attraction-themed boardgames and tin lunchboxes.
Tax docs. Bags of receipts. An entire carton of dead SCSI drives that had to be sent for secure disposal.
The next time I saw my stuff was a few days before I got married in Toronto. I had movers from Hudson Movers meet me at the locker. They were fabulous -- took the charity shop donations, the school donations, the art supplies I sent to Klockwerks, and all the stuff to ship to London away. They packed the shipment, filled in the customs forms, and put it all on the proverbial slow boat.
Two weeks ago, the boxes showed up at my office here in London, and I had a much longer pass through the stuff. By this point, it had been whittled down to six boxes. The books went onto the shelves, the t-shirts went into the storage closet, and a trove of my chewed kids' books and stuffed animals went back to the flat for my daughter.
The locker in Toronto is gone (well, technically, it's still there and filled with my family's junk, but that's their problem, not mine) and the goods are sorted and put away. Funnily enough, even after three or four passes through a "do I want this?" filter, I still had three boxes of garbage and donations out of the eight boxes that sailed the sea to London.
It's liberating. I feel lighter. For years, it felt like there was a weak and persistent nagging gravity tugging at me from Toronto, a needling, wheedling kvetch from all those unregarded possessions that I had responsibility for but no use for.
There's still a locker in LA -- well, in the desert outside of LA, it's one of those outfits that forklifts a storage box onto your lawn a week before you move; fill it up and call them and they forklift it back to some remote location with zero humidity until you request it again. I only have a dim recollection of what's in there, but I'm pretty sure it's almost all framed pictures that we had no room to hang in London but couldn't bear to part with. That and a couple of really good office chairs and a Danish dining room table that Mr Jalopy rescued from the garbage and refinished. Someday, if we move back to the States, we'll have instant decor. In the meantime, there's some of that nagging gravity being exerted by the box in the desert, too.
the latest
latest episodes
Stuff!
The best and lightest and freest I have ever felt was after a late November day in 1985, when over the span of six hours my house burned down, along with almost everything in it. For a brief few days, before my stunningly caring and generous community overwhelmed me and my family with clothes, tools, furniture and money, it was possible to understand clearly how possessions can hold you down. Remembering all this makes me think of Thoreau's comment about his farmer neighbors, going through life with their farms on their backs.
Thank you for going down the rabbit hole with this excellent piece!
I had a similar book experience, but mine was spread out over the course of several years. My book collection became the seed for a book store. There was a very painful/pleasurable peristaltic afterburn watching (literally) two and a half tons of very weird and wonderful books start to circulate through Evansville, IN in the `90's.
Are you really "jealous" of your privacy?
For the better part of the decade, I travelled to different countries to study. The first move, in 1997, I brought everything and was weighed down so in the airport that could barely walk and had to repack bags to come un under the per-piece weight limit. By 2000, I had everything I cared to have in a set of rolling luggage. Dorms and furnished flats meant that my own belongings were sparse -- the clothes that I routinely wore, books I was sure to read again, laptop. I decorated with colorful bottles and candles, which could be used or recycled. Anything I had acquired that I liked I often gave to friends on the theory they'd actually use it and I could see it again. I loved it. I felt very little gravity.
However, by 2004 I was finishing up and looking to stay in one place for a while. I realized that to live as an indvidual, one doesn't need much, but to make a home -- to have a family, to invite friends over -- a few more things were necessary, like more plates and silverware that I alone needed, furniature, and fancy if infrequently-worn clothes. So, now I'm married and have all that. I just try to keep the light days in mind, always ask "Do I really need that?" and be ready to send things along to a new life through goodwill.
C.D. said, "I had previously believed that these books were my identity, that you could know a man by the books he kept,..."
In a more perfect world (coming soon to a future near you), we could take all those books and hold them in one hand via our digital library. But I think it's not so much the books themselves, but being able to talk about the books with other people that makes them so important to us. Books can connect us in such a special way. Find a person that loves some of the same books you do and you might have found yourself a friend. "You can know a person by the friends they keep" is probably one of life's simple truths.
One very hot summer I decided it was time to get rid of some things; it had been eight months since I moved out on my own from my ex-wife and felt a need to go through all the boxes of junk that have been sitting unopened since I moved to my new place.
Six hours and a lot of water later, I had managed to dispose over fifteen boxes of junk that I figured I didn't need as it had been unused in the last months, plus it's lifespan before I moved out. Let me tell you it was the most freeing thing I have ever done and I continue to do it to this day. Excluding all my furniture, which is all Ikea and hence has no value beyond providing elevated surfaces for more things, I can fit everything I own in a large sedan - and another purge is imminent.
I know just the feeling you describe Cory and it is liberating. To those of you who look around at all the stuff you have I recommend a day to evaluate and discard all the things that are weighing you down. You'd be surprised what you can give up.
I am jealous of my privacy too. I do not like to share it; that's jealousy, right? If you can easily find me, you're in a pretty small group.
--Charlie
I hope when you said "warehouse loft" you didn't mean Ontario Street. Almost 15 years later and I'm still trying to get that boot factory dirt out of my stuff.
@#3 Loopdesign: jealous can mean "vigilant in guarding something". Check it out at http://www.thefreedictionary.com/jealous
@Cory: Have you considered having the t-shirts made into a quilt? Then they can keep you nostalgically warm on a winter's night.
Dustys, nope, I lived in the other end of town, on Fraser Ave near King and Dufferin!
A quilt's a lovely idea -- something for the idea file, certainly.
For one frightful minute I thought that this post was going to involve vas deferens. In days such as ours it is rare that a phrase like "my junk" ever means "my material possessions" and not "my genitals."
Fantastic post, Cory!
There is a large duplex in Cambridge where my ex & I moved after graduating from college. When we split up, numerous friends of ours moved in to take our places. After 3 years, the house's basement & closets were overflowing with junk.
Last night, I just finished sorting out the garbage from the stuff that's going to Goodwill. The house will be completely cleaned out by the end of this week, and I feel amazingly good. This post just made my day even better!
"A Journey Through My Junk" was the ill-fated sequel to "Fantastic Voyage."
From Craftzine:
T-Shirt Quilt
More Fabulous T-Shirt Quilts
Friday's T-Shirt Quilt Roundup
A Runner's T-Shirt Quilt
@#1 Sophie: Holy cow -- I've frequently told people that the most liberated I've ever felt was an early November day in 1995 when my apartment burnt down... A few days after, I had spent a few hours at the local bar, where people aware of my situation bought me drinks. I had everything in owned in the pack on my back, and I walked "home," which was to the friends' house where I was currently couch surfing. One of the year's first snows had just fallen, in gorgeous puffy flakes. I had a nice alcoholic glow as I left my footprints in an otherwise pristine landscape. It was pretty magical.
@AGIES(#10) I had the exact same experience.
I gave some rabbit hole blogging a shot but think I went a bit further off the beaten track...
On your subject matter though I recently started going through all the crap in my storage unit. It was lodged there by my wife and I, intending to bring it all back on returning from Thailand where we intended to move for a year or two. That never happened and we got divorced instead so now we have to endure the task of separating our stuff and deciding what the hell to do with it.
I've started by selling everything I can that I don't need/use, initially my Wii, computer games, CDs and DVDs. My electric guitar and bass amp will soon follow but I'm now almost £1,000 richer and planning a trip to St Petersburg and Moscow! Can't pretend I wouldn't rather have my relationship back instead but at least it softens the blow.
I am in the midst of cleaning out my long neglected office which became more of a toxic waste disposal site over the past couple of years. Too much stuff that was at one time considered essential enough to keep now just looks like garbage. And then there's the books! Walls of books. 8 walls of books - in a 4 walled room. FTW?! I am determined to get through this scabrous exercise of dust and debris by the end of this week - yes, it's going to take that long - and reclaim that room. I am horribly allergic to dust and I end having to take frequent breaks to cough, sneeze, hack, wheeze, itch and scrath myself into a trembling snotty exposed raw bundle of abused nerves. But occasionally I find something cool and go: "Awwww - I remember that." Thanks for posting this, Cory, it is exactly what I needed to put the dust mask and gloves back on and get the job done.
Cheers.
I just had nightmares about my storage unit in NJ .. it keeps eating 50$ every month .. but then again, it hosues my 800 piece CD collection and 4 boxes of priceless pajamas .. nothing i want to throw away .. but the logistics to have that moved .. argh
how much are you paying for your storage unit?
£65 every 4 weeks for mine, dunno the dollar equivalent offhand thanks to the pound plummeting so much recently
I did a huge thinning out recently too but I can't seem to let go of two things only. My old chain belt and my leather jacket with the Dead Kennedys on the back. Reading your post, I distinctly remember two things from way back when... 14 hole Dock Martins and a green bomber jacket with lots of black and white mod pins.
Thanks for the post Cory - after too many moves of the same 20-some boxes all over the GTA, I think it's time to do the last sort+toss+compress and get it down to only the most critical ephemera.
Oh, and I'm sure my wife is thanking you too!
How can anyone leave California for the UK--and do it twice! :)
#9 Kristie at Abyssco (abyssco.net) makes very fine t-shirt quilts.
A friend wants to offer Buddhist Moving services. They come to your place, pack your stuff into boxes and bring it to the landfill. It cures you of attachment to material goods pretty fast.
Of course, this friend just trashed all of his extra plates (ie, more than 1) because he never cooks and can't manage to wash dishes. If the dirty ones pile up, he buys more.
I, however and the granddaughter of the man who owned the junkyard in Watkins Glen NY. I believe that the physical objects that are part of our lives also have psychological importance-even the very books, not just the information contained therein.
Why is one chair perfect and another just wrong? One piece of cover art totally evocative and another horribly misleading? Would you have read that book with a different cover?
My stuff has been in storage for close to 2 years and I haven't been able to afford to replace the items like furniture, and the cooking tools acquired over decades. I'll be retrieving it this April and am looking forward to getting to know all of it all over again.
Secure disposal of old SCSI drives? You're depriving yourself and your family of fun. Get some safety goggles and a sledgehammer and go to it.
That persistent nagging is a problem (hello, box of wood-working tools in a basement in Toronto!) but worse is carrying around the guilt of turfing a bunch of stuff because you couldn't afford to store it, and no one had the room for it.
When I left Winnipeg I tossed all my computer hobby stuff into a dumpster. I mean *everything*. I had a tricked-out TRS-80 Model I (including *2* floppy drives and the auto-everything modem), a hotwired Colour Computer (literally -- I had piggy-backed RAM chips soldered onto the back of the the existing chips) for 32K RAM. All my programs I obsessed over. All my data, including the database of my books I created with the DB program I wrote. My custom cassette-loader I wrote in FIG-FORTH.
I also sold all those books (well over a thousand) for something like $50. Used book stores can see you coming a long way off. I mean, they were mostly trade paperbacks, so whatever.
I still get a twinge of guilt about all that neat stuff I tossed. Back then, no one had interest in this stuff except for nerds like me. We didn't even have the required population of techies to support any user groups.
But, we were in the middle of a recession (remember that /other/ laissez-faire economics downturn we had?), and I was out of work, broke, and couldn't wait to get the fuck out of Winnipeg. Vancouver wasn't much better (god, I hate that fucking town) but the idea was to keep moving, I guess.
BTW, there are titles in there that I can never replace on Amazon (or Abebooks, before it was Amazon) or whatever. I give you two reasons:
- Books go out of print. Sometimes you can't find them used, even. I know: I've tried.
- After a few decades the details about some books are gone from memory -- so you might not have enough details to scare up the author or title from some obscure plot-point you'd *really* like to revisit.
Not a reason to hang onto every paperback you've ever touched, but I do regret selling some of those books.
But, when you are paring your life down to the number of milk-crates that fit in your van -- well, there are going to be casualties.
If making your old-but-still-loved t-shirts into a quilt doesn't sound ideal for your situation, consider using the silk-screened part of a shirt to cover the all those obnoxious corporate logos on "free" schwag bags, shopping totes, etc.
Unable to overdye or remove the inks, esp. on the woven plastic fiber bags somehow labeled "green," I take some lightweight two-sided fusible interfacing (get it at a fabric store) and pasting over offending ads. A bit of stitching around the edges of the patch keeps things from fraying, or you could just run a thick bead of fabric glue under the edge.
The rest of the t-shirt can be used for housecleaning, btw. Not sure how well these compost though...
Walked away from it all two years ago. Open house. "WHY?" a friend asked. Because it was too sad to think of my friends and family morosely divvying up all that shit after I'm dead.
I started with nothin' and now I've got plenty of it.
Ally Ally Oxen Frreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
I love this piece. Thanks.
I've been pegged as the sentimental child in my family, so all of the "grandma" stuff that my sisters ran from got placed under my care. This includes a masterfully crafted French Provencial couch, chair, coffee table, and end tables all made in my uncle's shop in Greenville, Alabama in the 50s. Beautiful. And heavy. And hopelessly uncomfortable. Oh I tried using them for a few years but got tired of the mood-wrecking experience when a friend would lean back and smash her head on the carved wooden detail that ran along the edges, so now it all lives in a storage unit that costs me $125/month along with piles of other family treasures. I find it pretty easy to part with my own junk, but something about sending this furniture on to its next destination hurts - so much emotion caught up in these things. Why couldn't my grandmother have had a favorite ceramic dog instead of an entire set of living room furniture? My strategy is to find someone who will enjoy it as much as she did, then give it away. In the end, it's just stuff.
"I don't normally write much about my personal life here, partly because I'm pretty jealous of my privacy"
But on you Craphound podcasts this doesn't apply?
Cory, great to see you change your style on Rabbit Hole Day by putting a break in a long post.
:D
I stand humbly corrected.
Man, that's so weird. I've got the exact same thing. My storage closet is in DC. Had it for about 7 years, and forgot completely what was inside.
I'm settled down in Amsterdam now, and last year went through the closet. Trashed or gave away piles of stuff. Brought a couple bags over. Got it down to about half of a small storage closet.
Had the exact same thing with t-shirts and books. Not sure why t-shirts are so hard to let go of.
I threw out a ton of old stuff as part of Apartment Therapy's 8 week home "cure" (which I totally recommend and I might do again soon). It was truly liberating, getting rid of all that energy that was tying me down to those things.
Now the only thing that remains is seeing some of these awkward gangly photos of you with the knockouts. I imagine you're too jealous of your privacy to get into that, but there's nothing more liberating than making fun of bad photos of yourself. I'm on a message board where the most popular thread is the one where people must post terrible pictures of themselves. Go for it! :)
I was at a con this last weekend and someone said that the storage unit for yet other con (Penguicon) was loaded with a ton of junk. I said I was good at organizing and so volunteered to help. I feel so ready to just get too it now! You've all served as an inspiration! Thanks. Now, where are my matches?
Wow, you discovered that too, huh?
"There were enormous piles of books, of course... I'd amassed some 10,000 of the little wooden bastards. I had previously believed that these books were my identity, that you could know a man by the books he kept... But once I'd been separated from them, I discovered that I barely missed them. Now and again, I'd need to reference something in one of them and I'd find it on Amazon, usually for less than a buck."
I "sold" boxes and boxes of books to a used book store a few years ago for "store credit," which I have never used.
Thanks again, Cory, for making your "books" available electronically. No trees died in the process of my reading any of your novels!
I moved a lot as a kid. You think you moved a lot? I went to six schools in sixth grade. My residences numbered in the thirties when I was in my twenties. One thing about growing up that way is that you don't suffer from attachment. My father told me once "Whenever you move, throw out half of it. You don't need it anyway." I took it to heart and by the time I moved to San Francisco from NYC I did it in a Honda Accord.
Thinking on that in relation to this article I started to break down what was in that car and what has replaced it now. Most of my "stuff" (comics, CDs, tapes, photos) is in digital form now or will be soon and the computer it's on is 1/3 the size and ten times the speed. I've become realistic about what I wear and have less than half the clothes by volume. I'm not attached to any furniture or large pieces of art. Realistically, I could be out the door in twenty minutes with all of the "things" I value. It is a very liberating feeling.
This was great -- reading that someone as cool and successful as Cory has foibles like my own.
If you trust your digital storage (and backup) systems... I've found that having a picture of some things, like T-shirts and clothing and sometimes book and album covers, is enough of a mnemonic that I'm able to give up the physical artifact.
#34, your comment about a photograph of an artifact being enough is very true.
i had a large box of trophies won for various things. i took pictures of each trophy, then consigned them to a landfill.
i have spent the last few years sorting through the accumulation of many years of marriage. (two packrats should never tie the knot because when it is untied there is a ton of miscellany to cull.)
i have considerably less than before, as in a couple thousand cubic feet less, but still can pare it down further.
the defining moment was when i had to pack three cats and belongings in a mustang to evacuate wildfires in southern california. afterwards looking at what i had chosen to take i realised everything else in the 2000 sq ft house was only "stuff".
thanks, cory, i am glad to see there are more of us who are finding liberation.
i heard a saying once that goes something like this do not allow your possessions to possess you. it is true.
@Robbo - and anyone else cleaning 'junk' - go to a welders supply store or online and buy a P100 particulate mask like this one:
http://www.allergybegone.com/3m-6291-respirator-mask.html
It has a plastic frame and replaceable pink filters.
You _will_ feel better after cleaning than if you don't wear it. Seriously. Wear it for metal work and welding as well, of course. No more welder's flu.
Now we know why this isn't your regular blogging style, Cory. You'd burn out in less than a week! Thanks for the sharing, and now I'm going to try to figure out what my blogging style is so I can participate, too. --Catherine Shaffer (Nice to meet you again, even though every time is the first time. :-)
What a great post. My family recently completed a massive purge of our own, although I suspect there is a lot more we could get rid of. Our goal was to have a place for everything. We no longer have anything that doesn't fit on a shelf or in a drawer. No more boxes of random papers, no more piles of blankets in the back corner of the closet. It feels great!
I'm sorely tempted to ditch about 80% of my books. Powell's would actually pay be for a lot of them. Goodwill would take the rest.
What's holding me back are the autographed ones. I really don't think I'll read any of those Hal Clement novels again, but the guy did sign them...
so strange... i had no idea that it was down the rabbit hole day, but i made a post after an age on my own blog on just this day, and it was, i quote directly from the post...
"...an unusual kind of post for this blog. I am just stepping back out into the yard, blinking in the sun and acknowledging change. I will try to fill in the holes as the dust settles. The chronicle of the days will return to normal programming..."
beautifully serendipitous...
As to junk;
I am on the side of order. I'm the friend you call when you look at those boxes full of a button from your three year old cardigan, 50 balls of wool each large enough to knit a nose warmer and clothes you will never wear again but just can't bear... and so on.
Not that I'm not sentimental, I just need to create order, so i can have a head that isn't in chaos.
I have often thought that I'd love to have a little business which I'd call More Space, where i go in and do a "my life on the lawn" (trash tv reference) on people's homes for them, and create peace and order where once was lovely sentimental chaos.
someone once sent me these links to sites about squalor... it was fascinating... the sites were about programs for people who lived in squalor, and how they turned their lives around... there were photos of these spaces where people lived, which were sometimes fetid and sometimes just so full of junk that you couldn't imagine how they would even enter the room. There were progress photos: before, after and during. morbid and fascinating to me.
Thanks heaps for this wonderful post, and for providing rant space, masquerading as a comment!
My family and I are looking at moving later on this year. We're already beginning the packing process. It's strange because I have stuff, but the stuff I have is definitely valuable to me somehow. While most things can be had in digital format it is a pleasure for me to sit with a book and smell the paper and hear the pages rustle as I turn them. My little knick-knacks have already been pored through: my Curious George "stuff" collection, the things I call my "writing fetishes" through which I attempt to channel the mysterious ether of creativity, and random other things all have been set aside for preservation from the Dustbin Reaper. Some of my stuff is in storage in my parents' garage, where they kindly keep it rent-free while I come over for the weekend and pretend to "go through it" knowing I'm not going to be able to throw out another thing.
I have more things than can comfortably fit in my bedroom but less than will fill an apartment (that nobody else has life-ephemera to display in). Probably in the future I will pare it down again but until then I always enjoy the pleasure of opening a box I haven't opened in 2 years and discovering, again, what neat things I have in there and thinking about where to put them once I have the space.
And thanks for the reminder Cory, I guess I am going try to write something interesting and/or different today!
Great story.
@27 http://community.livejournal.com/whatwasthatbook/ is a good resource for identifying favorite books based on vague memories. They enjoy a challenge.
@44 Think how delighted someone will be to find an autographed Hal Clement novel at Powell's.
Cory donating his 10,000 books to his brother's school library reminds me of Thomas Jefferson donating his library to rebuild the Library of Congress after the British burned it down in the War of 1812.
T-shirts seem to hold sentimental value for lots of people, and maybe more so for men? Anyway, a few years ago I had a quilt made out of Bruce's beloved tees: http://www.flickr.com/photos/shawnconna/sets/72157600293494467/
We were so pleased with the results that we're getting a second quilt made and will use them as heirloom for our two sons. I have a few quilts my great grandmother made, and we have a wedding quilt made by Bruce's aunt, so being able to continue this tradition in a new way for our boys is fantastic.
LiveJournal - the original source of the Rabbit-Hole Day meme has a Rabbit-Hole Day community with links to stories and blog posts.
Some are good, some are bad, and some are very, very strange. Hopefully someone will collect some favourites this year, too.
Wow! What a fantasticacious post.
Thanks!
i moved and rented a twenty yard dumpster and everything that wasn't used within a year prior went to the dump, or someone else.
also what kind of dog is that? i just got a dog from the local rescue that looks just like it.