Stuff

With the tax and SBA/PPP seasons over I started cleaning my garage. It was either that or my sock drawer and standing and moving around in the garage was more appealing. The sock drawer could wait until it rained, and to get rid of a large volume of stuff the garage won hands up.

The first thing I decided to tackle was old books in a dozen boxes piled up behind a lot of junk, i.e. previously known as good stuff. These boxes hadn’t been looked at for at least a half dozen years, so it made no sense to keep them. After all, I am not a Library or Museum; and if I wanted to re-read them I could always check them out of my local library and if they didn’t have it, then one of the thirty libraries in its consortium would likely have it. When I cleared the space and opened the boxes it was not hard to notice the smell and rotting, so donating them was out of the question. I spent about an hour tying bundles for the recycling truck to pick up. It would have taken less if I didn’t go through some of the books and decide to keep them for a little while so I could reread selected passages. I put them in a pile, and not in another box.

One book caught my eye almost immediately and coincidently it was near the top. It was a book on how to overcome procrastination. I never got to it and decided to flip through it and saw that it was published 24 years ago and that I must have bought it when it was published because it had a Borders price sticker. I put that aside to read sometime, but as I started to write this blog I quickly decided to put for the next recycling pick up. I recalled an Evelyn Woods’ Reading Dynamics course I once took and she [this was when she started and taught the course herself] said that one way to deal with a 300-page book in five minutes was to flip through the pages and if you decide you wouldn’t like it or if it didn’t appear to be worth the time to read, then don’t read it. I remembered this and I no longer will be a procrastinator with respect to that book. Goodbye Charlie!

I have a lot of interests and if I find a book on such a topic I usually buy it. I am much better than I used to be since I now take many books out of the library instead of buying them. Also, I no longer have any space for books and the books I have, take me days to move off and then back into the bookcases when we have the house painted, or want new carpeting for one of the rooms with bookcases. Sometimes I want to rearrange the books so similar topics are together – that becomes a major project so it never gets completed but even partially done I now know where similar topic books are situated.

Another thing I am throwing out are the many magazines I save with articles about investing that I usually refer to at the end of the year to “prove” how wrong the articles were on their top stock picks for the year, the decade or for a lifetime. Right now, none of this seems relevant or usable so I am tying these up for recycling. Actually, my point in saving these is to show how wrong the so-called experts were; however, for the last few years I have been using the articles they published at the end of the year to show how “right” they were. I wrote about some of them in blogs and since they all underperform the market indexes, I wonder if they live in an alternate universe.

I have a lot of “stuff’ besides books and magazines and realize that acquiring each item cost money and took time to purchase, time to put somewhere, and now time to throw away. It seems pretty stupid so I am resolving to buy less stuff. It’s easy now being homebound. Hopefully, when this is over I won’t feel that I will then have much more room for my new “stuff.”

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