Being bored and feeling a little guilty about not doing any work in the Box Room today, I went in and did some work on it. I just had the first of what I expect to be at least a few very depressing moments. Once I had the bike out of there, I moved that stupid carpet (couldn’t move it far alone), and I found a very, very old box of things from 1984. In said box was one of my ceramic works and my high school yearbooks. The ear was broken of the ceramic piece, and I can’t find the ear. That isn’t the depressing thing.

The depressing thing is that a colony of silverfish apparently took up residence in my yearbooks at some point over the decades when that box was in a variety of non-climate-controlled storage rooms (didn’t look like recent damage and there were no silverfish to be seen thankfully), and I had to throw them out. They were in worse shape than the Dead Sea Scrolls … all in pieces and stuck together. They crumbled when I moved them. I cried when I tossed them into the trash bin.

We didn’t have a lot of money for cameras or film developing when I was in high school, and now there’s a whole four years of my life in pictures that’s just gone. I think all total, I have about three rolls of photos of my friends and myself from those years. So I have a few, but I won’t have the silly notes my friends wrote in my yearbooks, I won’t have the photos of the clubs I was in or the activities I did. I know there are people I was close to back then that I have no photos of at all. It’s just all very saddening.

Well, I wanted to let go of the past, right? High school was so long ago, and to be honest, I have fewer good memories than I do bad ones. Maybe it’s for the best it all ends up in the trash and not looked through and thought about over and over. I still have my good memories after all, right in my tiny little brain where they have always been. The only thing that will take those away is old age, and I think I have a few years before that starts happening. At least I certainly hope so.

But … but … I had to throw away my high school yearbooks, and that just really, really sucked.

1981 wasn’t as damaged as the rest of them. It’s on the porch in case there are any bugs in it. Later, I may try to save a few photos from it. Or not. Maybe I should just toss it too. I don’t know.

Here is the bike that was just the source of a heated discussion:

It was built on October 6, 1964, and it’s a Schwinn Co-Ed. After doing some further research, even if it was in much, much better condition, it would be worth about $150, which means this one is worth much, much less. I have now been given permission to do whatever I want with it.

I don’t know what I want to do with it. I like it, and it would be neat to have a working bicycle, but it’s going to have to have the rust removed, the gears and such cleaned and lubed, and it will need to be primed and painted … and probably needs new tires and tubes. I guess I have to decide if I personally feel like doing that much work on it and whether or not I will use it enough once that’s done to make it all worthwhile. It would be great if someone mechanically inclined would help me fix it up so I could ride it, but that isn’t going to happen. This will be another of those projects that is “all on me” to do. I guess I’ll take a few days to think about it. In the meantime, it’s moving outside, because I am not putting it back in the Box Room, and it can’t very well sit in the kitchen for a few days.

I tossed and turned all night. My body was fatigued, but my brain was going a million miles an hour. I don’t know what time I finally fell asleep, but when I woke up this morning, I felt like I hadn’t slept at all, and that spot in my back that always gets achy was feeling a little tender. So … I went back to bed for a few hours and actually slept. Still feel tired and achy.

I haven’t done my hour in the Box Room today. I don’t want my back to go from achy to full-blown painful, and I’ve reached a point where I need to move some larger objects. There are some things I really need to do this weekend, and I don’t want to distress my back and end up having to sit on the couch for a couple of days.

I did poke around in there for a while to see what was going on in that one corner I have been working on. Well, lo and behold, there’s a huge folded up roll of the most obnoxious green carpet in there. It’s certainly taking up some room it need not be taking up. I remember we scavenged it from somewhere, because we were going to use it to make a cat tree for Fuzza, but we never did. My first thought was we should use it to build a cat tree for the monsters, but this is not ever going to happen. When I add together the time and energy requirements with the other supply requirements, it would really just be better to buy one if we decide they need one. So this weekend, Lin is going to have to help me get that carpet out of there, and it’s going on Freecycle. I’m sure there’s someone else out there who will think it is just the thing they need and then it can go sit around someone else’s house for a few years. It doesn’t need to be sitting around in my house, that’s for certain.

There’s also a vintage Schwinn girl’s bike in there from about the 1950’s or so. Lin bought it for $10 ages ago. It’s not in terrible shape, and I think I could fix it up to ride pretty easily. Of course, first I’d have to have Lin’s approval. He wanted to restore it properly and sell it. That hasn’t happen, and it isn’t likely to happen. I wouldn’t be restoring it to it’s previous condition. I’d just get the rust off, by some good paint, and make it pretty enough to be seen on. It’d be fun, healthy and useful to have a working bike. Having a non-working bike sitting around my house is no fun at all. So either it gets painted and fixed up well enough to use (and to be locked outside without rusting away) or it goes. I don’t have room in my life for useless things like bikes with rust and flat tires.

One thing I have discovered is that my husband has the same sort of hording tendencies as my parents. He isn’t old enough to have been around in the Great Depression, but he has that same mindset: don’t throw that away, even though it is somewhat old and broken, because it can be fixed or might be useful in some way. I understand that thinking. I was raised by a poor family that survived the Depression too, so I have the same urges, but … we can’t keep everything just because it might some day come in handy. Lin seemingly hasn’t crossed that hurdle yet and made it to the side that realizes the futility of saving every little thing.

If you have been keeping something for years or decades, because you might use it or need it eventually, and you haven’t yet used it or needed it, all it’s doing is taking up space and getting in the way. A perfect example of this is my parent’s collection of plastic caps and lids. I don’t know how many plastic caps and lids my mother has in her garage, but it’s enough that neither of us can lift them. She asked me what to do with them all. I told her to throw them away or ask the recycling place if they wanted them. “But, maybe we could make something out of them!” Has any one of us actually made anything with any of them in all the years they have been in that garage? No. What are the chances any one of us is going to make anything out of them at any time in the future? Zero, if past history is taken into account. Therefore, just get rid of them.

This all ties in with the rant I was writing last night (and have decided not to post). I’m throwing out and giving away a lot of stuff. Some of it is very cool stuff. If I hadn’t thought it was cool stuff at some point, I wouldn’t have had it in my life and hauled it around with me from home to home every time I moved. But … what good is a bunch of cool stuff sitting around in boxes? It’s no good at all. As I was telling my mom yesterday (and my husband last night) about the things I have already cleared out of my life in just a few days, both of them had little heart attacks about me getting rid of something useful or something that could have been sold rather than given away. How could I possibly give away things that could be sold?!?! It’s really, really easy. I determine how much time it would take to get it ready to sell, to sell it, and then to get it to the person who is buying it. I divide the amount of money I think I might make by the number of hours it will take me to get it. Unless the hourly wage is going to be outstandingly great, it gets given away, because it’s not worth my time and energy. Even though I am “only” a housewife/artist, my time is actually worth something to me. It’s worth way more to me that spending hours and hours making $5 here and there and having to deal with all the hassle that entails.

It really just comes down to priorities and what makes a person happy. I have never been especially hung up on money, so long as I have enough for the essentials of life plus a little spoil myself from time to time. To me, just getting rid of stuff and having some empty space in my home is worth far more than adding a couple hundred dollars to my bank account one small sale at a time. Everything you own is not an investment. Sure, there are people who collect, buy and sell McDonald’s Happy Meal toys, but when I look at my own small collection of them, I don’t see dollar signs. I just see stuff I am going to get rid of as easily as possible and more free space in my life once it is gone.

And now Lin is home. He agrees the carpet can just be gotten rid of, but he is insistent on selling the bike, because it “must” be worth some money. I have to go have an argument, I mean discussion, now.