pseydtonne | Take that, you piles of... oh hey, another Luc Sante book!

I felt ready to tackle more scary papers. I only wound up with one box of papers, but it was a big box. It was big enough to hold several books, several newsweeklies I'd picked up when I was in Montréal in November of 2005 (to see Nine Inch Nails with

fangirl715, so it accidentally ties in with yesterday's post), and a butt load of old receipts.

I need to do something different with my ancient receipts. I used to keep my old receipts because I would enter them into my checkbook and compare the results with my bank statement. I'd usually do the checkbook figures in my head, which was fine when I was a hundredaire.

Actually, even that isn't true. I once found myself nearly two hundred dollars above reality because I didn't carry correctly on two occasions. This would've been fine if I weren't in university, where I wasn't earning a paycheck. Suddenly I had nine bucks in my account. I sorted everything out, but I started using a calculator at least once a month to check myself.

I stopped keeping tabulations a few years ago. It was driving me nuts trying to find where I'd miscounted a dollar or had a check pending. I could get an accurate reading from my online bank statement, which was daily instead of monthly, and then sort through the last few receipts. I still wound up with fistsful of receipts at the end of the quarter. Even now that I'm spending significantly less than I was while I was working, I still have to sort the buggers.

I'm not in the correct head space to handle that problem. Since I don't itemize my deductions, I don't need the receipts after the return periods expire. Perhaps a shredder would be useful.

I dealt with three other boxes before calling it quits: two contained nothing but computer books, so I just placed them in the mud room. One more box had glassware, which is going into the basement. I don't have enough kitchen shelving to store a bunch of drinking glasses. Anybody want some?

The rack I set up in the basement yesterday only contains empty boxes (including the milk crates I use to move vinyl records), but it's already proving to be very useful. I have space upstairs, which really means my roommate will soon have space upstairs. Once I've finished clearing my stuff out of the scary room early next week, the First Round of Organizing will be complete. Then I can tackle the residual questions, such as:

What happens to the data CDs?
How do I organize the sprawling book collection?
Do dial-up modem cards make decent rifle targets? (Hypothesis: too much flying metal)
Will I ever see a 5.25" floppy disk again or should I just toss that dual-floppy drive?
I have lots of cool toys. Anybody wanna come over to play?

Today was reassuring. I'm near the end of seeing any more boxes of paid bills from years ago. I could almost count the boxes that remain to be sorted (it's hard to see around the columns of stuff) and only one had stubs sticking out from it. I still need to clear off the dining room table again, but I could simply use my straight arm and a wiping motion if it came to that.

It's afternoon on April Fool's Day, so the pranks should have finished. I'm going to take a walk, cook something for a pot luck and head out.