Posts Tagged ‘saving receipts’
Top Drawer
The top drawer of my dresser does not store any clothing items. If residential kitchens are known for having a household “junk” drawer, the first drawer in my dresser is my personal junk drawer. All too often, when I cover the flat top surface with too many things, and Cyndie wants the room cleaned like a hotel getting ready for new guests, it all gets shoved into that top drawer.
Yesterday, with the weather being rather unfriendly for outdoor activity, I took the bold step of pulling that drawer out of the dresser and unloading the entire contents onto our bed to be dealt with in one way or another. One of the reasons this task has been neglected for years is my knowledge that it wouldn’t be easy to know what to do with everything.
I also knew it would take more hours to complete than I wanted to dedicate to the project but I decided the best way to deal with that was to force the issue by dumping it all out and using our bed so I would be forced to finish what I started.
Did you know a lot of retail receipts have disappearing ink? I found several of the funky paper strip receipts that seemed worth keeping at the time weren’t even legible to know what was purchased. I found a very readable receipt for the chainsaw purchased in 2013. I actually do have a file in the den for what I call “long-term save receipts” where that should be filed.
It felt good to fill a bag of trash and one for recycling with stuff that was beyond their useful dates. When one enters ‘decluttering’ mode, one can easily part with things that were once deemed worth saving, and the momentum becomes a positive feedback loop.
For a person who never needed glasses until about my mid-forties, I found a surprising amount of eyewear had accumulated. I also uncovered no less than four digital pocket cameras, revealing the evolution of my camera hardware over the years.
I have charged all the batteries and verified basic function enough to allow me to look into ways to release these back out into the world for the purpose for which they were designed.
Is there a subset of the population that doesn’t have cell phone cameras? It’s probably small, which is why the cameras all ended up being stored in the drawer in the first place.
Around lunchtime, I wished to be done with the project but pushed on after a break and brought it to a close before the dinner hour arrived.
Topping off my satisfaction is the fact I moved no more than two small things from my top drawer to the kitchen junk drawer. I’ve got a bag of stuff to put back into circulation, a filled small bag of trash, a fair amount of recyclables, many odds and ends knick-knacks relocated to logical places, and the rest returned to the drawer with room to spare.
Special shout-out to Cyndie for her moral support and willingness to find new uses or storage locations for items that would have stumped me.
Here’s hoping I don’t allow the drawer to become overstuffed again anytime soon.
.
.
Big Purge
There has been a heroic level of de-cluttering going on around here lately. The credit goes to a burst of energy Cyndie experienced after doing some clean out of her mom’s house in preparation for a pending move. First, she inspired me to jettison a bunch of clothes I haven’t worn for years. Then, she brought me the contents of file cabinets that haven’t been cleaned out in a very long time.
I’d like to know who saved all this stuff in the first place.
The folder of long-term saved receipts was the most entertaining. I really need to remember to take the time to write what the receipt is for whenever that is not obvious. I was finding sales slips that had no clear identification of what the store or items purchased were. Why did we save those?
There were receipt slips with no date on them. Receipts for Apple products were printed with disappearing ink.
The types of purchases we intend to save records for a long time would be big-ticket items like furniture, appliances, or items of a high dollar amount. That’s why I would find Apple receipts. They’re not much good long-term if the print fades after two years.
Mixed into valid items in that file, I found silly, incidental low-dollar receipts. Better safe than sorry, we must be thinking at the time. Eight or ten years later, it makes for a laugh that we thought that way, originally.
We found our original marriage certificate tucked inside a folder of financial documents. Glad we haven’t needed to locate that document for decades. We never would have found it there.
After dinner last night, Cyndie sprung a surprise on me of some DVDs she discovered. Neither of us remembers getting old VHS tapes of home movies we’d recorded converted to digital, but there they were.
It went all the way back to 1986 when we made an attempt at recording movies that would chronicle the growth of our children, starting with 18-days-old Elysa up at the lake place. There were movies that neither of us remembers having watched back when they were originally recorded.
With a slice of warm from the oven blueberry/lemon pie for dessert last night, we viewed the first disc of three with Elysa’s name on it and then the first one of two with Julian’s. It was the obvious over-documentation of a firstborn and under-documentation of any child after the first one.
In classic kid form, at two years older than her little brother, Elysa was often seeking to be the center of focus when Mom and Dad were trying to record the boy.
We relived our kids’ first feedings of solid foods, first steps, and first birthdays. It had a significant ’80s vibe. There was a segment recorded at my mom’s small place for a Thanksgiving turkey dinner that included a glimpse of my vibrant (now-deceased) sister, Linda that amped up the already heavily nostalgic rush we were enjoying.
While in the middle of purging a lot of unneeded accumulation, we uncovered a treasure trove of memories we didn’t even know we had.
.
.
.
Relative Something 