It seems that I am a regular pack rat, a hoarder of the worst kind storing anything and everything even if it is twenty years old and absolutely worthless. My office, which I seldom use now except that the printers are in there, is also filled with boxes of old records, piles of folders and other stuff stacked in neat piles around the room. Did I mention that the two cats have claimed that room as their own and so have their food bowl and water on the desk. Being cats, they shed all over the place which adds to them customizing the room to their use. The small closet attached to the office is full to the ceiling with old electronic stuff that is either old, broke or plain out of date as I moved on to more modern technology. I have been using computers for twenty or more years so I have lots of stuff, used stuff, out of date stuff, obsolete stuff, you get the picture. I was always trying to have the latest and greatest  and was constantly moving with the times. It was great to have the best technology at my fingertips but meanwhile, old technology was and still is taking up space in the closet.

This is not the end of it as it is starting to spill over into the spare bedroom. If I ever had guests stay over, they would have to sleep on the couch along with the big ole mutt dog as they would not be able to get into the spare bedroom. I can barely get into the spare bedroom as there are so many boxes of papers and reports, old medical equipment, books and stuff stacked all around the room and on the bed. The room also has a small closet that does have some space left in it besides the books and LP’s it already has but I can’t get to it as it is on the far side of the room beyond all the boxes and stuff.

The other closet has all of the clothes I wear nowadays consisting of lots of shorts and tee shirts, more shorts and tee shirts, a couple of pairs of jeans for when the weather gets below freezing, soccer clothes for coaching the kids and a couple of dress pants and jackets although I haven’t seen them in a while. They have to be there somewhere. The rest of the closet is piled high with other stuff that I can’t find space for in the other places.

Ah, you say, what about the garage. Well lets see. There is a car, a trailer, a riding mower and a refrigerator. Stacked neatly around the rest of the garage are the boxes that all of the new computer stuff came in before it turned into old technology. It says right there on the box,” keep this box in case of…”.So I kept them. I think that warning is a bit like the ones on mattresses and pillows where it says not to remove the label under some unnamed  penalty. Me, I’m too scared to take them off in case something horrific happens to me while I’m asleep like another nightmare. Have you ever noticed that when you dream, things never work too well? Legs don’t work and you can’t run away, arms and fists don’t work so you can never fight back and if it happens to be a good dream and there is some imaginary woman involved, you always wake up just before you get to the really good part. Worst part of all, I can never remember what I was dreaming about. Gotta stop watching those horror movies.

I have three sheds out in the yard. One is a workshop and is set up with a table saw and other power tools. It has a limited amount of free space as the rest is taken up by all of the lumber stacked in there to keep it dry along with all kinds of other good stuff, plastic pipe fittings, lots of hand tools and on and on. No room left in that one.

The smaller shed which used to be an aviary when I kept birds many years ago is piled high with all of the motorized yard equipment, push mowers, weed whacker, hedge trimmers and the like. There is also a smaller trailer plus all of the ladders in there and quite honestly, absolutely no room for any boxes filled with paper. Even if I could find room, the rats and mice would have a field day tearing it all up.

The last shed is actually a greenhouse and besides using if for that purpose, it also is conveniently located next to the ponds and so has a lot of pond equipment and tools. Definitely no room in that one and even if there was, I would have to move it again to make room for wintering the plants that are in pots in the hope of having them alive in the Spring.

I looked into shredding this sensitive stuff and that seems to be the way to go. So, I bought some boxes and started sorting out the paper to make sure that I was throwing the right stuff away. That was four months ago and I have filled one box so far. Gonna take a while at this rate. What we need is a couple of rainy days as this would be an ideal project for that. Can’t get out in the garden and can’t coach the kids, what better to do than sort out paper. It’s pretty safe to say that this could be a long project as the weather people are forecasting this drought to go on for a few more years…

Maybe I should give some serious thought to adding on a room or two or better yet, buying another shed except I have no place to put it out the back unless I turned it into a house boat and stuck it on one of the ponds. Probably too drastic a move. A garage sale you say or in my case, an extremely large yard sale. Only problem with that idea is that I would still have to sort out the junk in the first place. In the past, when I was trying to get rid of things that still had some usefulness to them, I just left them out side my gate on the side of the road with a sign that read,”Help Yourself. Free stuff” and I could guarantee that it would be gone before the day was over.  You have no idea what some people will pick up.

I could change my will so that the kids that stand to inherit any money left over after I complete my bucket list would have to inherit the junk as well and would have to figure what to do with it. I need to give this some serious thought because that sounds like a really good idea. In the meantime, I’ll just move things around a little and stack the stuff just a little tidier. That should do it for now. Oh yes, if you ever need to see who won a game between two of the local teams ten years ago, I could probably tell you. That is, if I knew where to look and which junk pile it is likely to be in…