My promise was to clear out the basement storage area/utility room this winter. Well here it is, almost the beginning of spring, and I'm pleased to report that the project is almost completed. When I was single and living alone, I have thrived amid massive, almost legendary, material chaos and clutter. But once into the thick of it, even I was amazed at how much stuff can accumulate in a mere eight years (when we joined households), and how fairly uncomplicated the sort vs. dump process has been. I found my kindergarten class picture (c. 1957) and my old stamp collection, and the braid cut off during my wife's first childhood hair-cutting event. Definitely keepers. I found an old 12-string guitar (a West German Cordova -- see thread above the line), status at present unclear. I also found a box of bank statements from 1990 (two banks ago); a bag of dead batteries; a large bag of broken coat hangers; a pair of analog cable converter boxes; a severely wounded CD player, a dead televison, and an even deader computer box -- a burned out motherboard and no hard drive; several boxes of clothes that haven't been worn since the Reagan administration. . . Our neighborhood association is having a clean-up day in a couple weeks: bring out your dead electronics and difficult-to-recycle plastics, and they will do the recycling for us (I got a reprieve from the end-of-winter deadline to take advantage of the service). . . between that and Goodwill, I should only have to make one trip to the dump. And, nearing the end here, it looks like I've managed to do this with room to spare for everything that actually needs room.

Wish me luck on the dash to completion.

michael