THE HOARDINGS

THE HOARDINGS

This year, I made three New Year’s resolutions.  I don’t usually make any, but for the final year of the Age of Pisces, why not give it a shot: 

1) to get a real bed.  Except for guest rooms and motel rooms, I haven’t slept in a real bed since 1990.  Its time to put away the piece of foam rubber and to give my aching joints a respite.  Problem:  I have nowhere to put a bed because of the clutter of hoardings.

2)to get a new laptop.  Time to retire my three obsolete computers.

3)to get rid of or use for the original purpose wherefore they entered my life, The Hoardings.

The hoardings consists of three rooms wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling, plus two storage lockers, full of things acquired during the 61 years of my life.  Most of it is some form of paper: notes, clippings, print-outs, letters, books, magazines.  Also, about a dozen flash drives loaded with electronic items.  This all needs to be sorted:

-- items to trash or re-cycle or delete

-- items to be gifted to family, friends or someone in need of the item

-- items to be converted into e-books for sale

-- items to be sold on eBay, Kijiji or my own site

-- items to be sold at garage sale

-- items to be used as research/reference for my numerous manuscripts-in-progress or blog-items-in-progress and then discarded or sold

-- items to be saved for personal reasons to be assigned to a specific place in The Hermitage, The Bat Cave, or The Pantry

-- maybe other categories?

Most of my material from the 1970s and prior is handwritten, from 1979 to 1995 is typed, and only after 1995 is in Word files.  Everything from the earlier years that I want to make use of will need to be converted into Word files which can be searched and edited on my computer.  Tremendous amount of work to convert 4,200 cubic feet of paper into electronic material!

I’m aiming at inventorying at least 50 items in each post.  Stage Two is follow-through.