Spring Cleaning

I didn't mean to end up like those people on TV, whose houses are absolutely full of stuff that they can't bring themselves to throw away, but here I am.  There is stuff everywhere.  When we put the second floor on the house, we packed up and put a lot of stuff into storage, and then, somehow, we never took it out.  Anything we really needed had long ago been replaced, and the boxes just stayed in the storage unit, and we paid rent to keep them there, month after month, year after year.  I don't even want to say how many years it's been there.  I'm too embarrassed.

But Tom has taken the initiative to get us out, one way or another.  There are boxes of stuff piled up everywhere, now, but there also is a dumpster in the driveway.  My job is to sort out the stuff I want to keep (my medical school diploma, for example, which is in a box in the foyer) from the files of old photocopies of even older articles that I probably didn't need when I first got them. 

And I am not only facing this at home - it's exactly the same thing at work, where we are getting ready to move to a new building with post-modern file space (which is to say, no file space), so almost all the accumulated paper in my office has to go, too.  I guess it's helpful this is happening at the same time, because otherwise I might try to take stuff from home to the office, or stuff from the office home.  Now, it just all needs to go in the dumpster (or maybe the recycling bin, at least until its full).  There was a pile of relatively recent journals in the foyer that were supposed to go to the office, but there's no point.  I just went through them, saved a few and tore out a few articles I thought I might actually read, and took the rest of them to our blue recycling bin, which is almost full.  (Yesterday, the photocopied articles went there.)

Yesterday I went through boxes of books, and maybe half of them are boxed up again, to go to Goodwill, and there's another pile - old guidebooks and some very out-of-date medical books - that will go in the trash.  This morning I moved more from the "keep" pile to the Goodwill pile.  Years ago I went to Fiji, and I guess that's why I have a copy of  "Fiji in the Pacific:  A History and Geography of Fiji," 3rd edition (1976).  I realized, this morning, flipping through the yellowed pages, that even if someone in this household did want to know something about Fiji and we did keep the book, it would never occur to any of us (even me) to go looking for it; we would do what we always do, nowdays, when we want to look something up, which is to start with Google.

It's the same thing with the journals.  If I actually needed something, I wouldn't look in my files - I'd look in an on line database and download the article as a pdf file.  I don't even know exactly why I still subscribe to all these journals - I have access to electronic subscriptions at work - and if I needed something, I wouldn't look for a paper copy.

In the meantime, several of the local Border's bookstores are closing, and the company is in bankruptcy - it couldn't compete with the online retailers.  I already wrote about the neighborhood videostore going out of business.  The newspapers have been in trouble for a while and it's not clear what the business model is that is going to keep them in business. 

I'm sure someone foresaw the effect of these disruptive technologies, but I didn't.  If I had, maybe I wouldn't have saved all this paper.  I didn't save it because it was valuable, or because I had a sentimental attachment to it, but because I thought it might be useful sometime.  But of course it's only useful if you can find what you need when you need it, and that's why Google is going to take over the world.

Anyone need any empty boxes?