Teleidoscope

Wed, Apr 25, 2007

Shredding the Night Away

Posted at 10:31 pm MDT to Technology

The new shredder I bought has a special slot for shredding credit cards and CDs. I'm not putting everything through it: envelopes and non-financial junk mail are just getting dumped, so with a little luck it won't burn out on me. The cleaning ladies came today, so I have two weeks available for spreading papers all over the dining room table to sort them.

I still haven't found the refinance folder with the survey, or a couple of other documents I'm looking for (though the original hard copy returns for my 2005 tax year have surfaced), but I'm making a dent in the clutter around here, which feels good. I'm seeing a bare spot on the desk in my study/computer room for the first time in ages. It's just a tiny dent in the appalling clutter in that room (which has been used for equipment and storage, not as a work environment for the past few years), but at least it is visible progress.

I really should pull the hard drives from some old computers and take the computers and my old laser printer down to the toxic waste dropoff. I need space in the study more than I need nostalgia. And I can't build the server I've been thinking about until I have a place to put it.

The crate of papers I sorted this evening turned out to contain a lot of stuff that should have been sorted and filed around the time I started being a road warrior, including a lot of things that I didn't discard at the time because they needed to be destroyed more thoroughly than I could manage without a shredder (I hate credit card statements with 'courtesy checks' attached). I think I discarded and/or shredded 2/3 of the total volume of papers, which is encouraging. One third of the current volume of papers over-all would be much more manageable than the current mass.

The next crate should have much more recent stuff. I also have some Amazon boxes of very recent papers (2005 and later) queued up, but they mostly contain small papers like credit card statements. I already know those don't contain anything as large as the folder of Refinance closing papers, but they are already partly sorted, so they should go quickly.

I now have a nasty suspicion that the folder I'm looking for actually got stuck in one of the filing boxes in the sewing room (which I absolutely don't remember doing). But since I'm not sure which refinance the survey was done for, I'm not really sure which layer of sedimentary paper I need to discover and excavate. Tomorrow morning, by daylight, I'll pull the rest of the possibly financial papers from the study out into the dining room, along with the top filing box from the sewing room (which contains stuff that's only partially sorted).

Between all the books and papers, it sometimes feels like half the volume of this house is paper. If I don't want to achieve 'crazy-old lady in fire-trap' status, I need to do a lot of pre-emptive sorting and discarding. This shredder is way overdue.

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