Cobbled together from assorted recent facebook posts

[hrj]

2018/07/13 23:00

For the last several weeks I’ve been doing a gradual purge and cleaning of my refrigerator and freezer. I really need a better system than memory for the identification of the contents of freezer containers. Especially after four or five years. Was that leftover spaghetti sauce? Oxtail soup? Ah, no, it’s medlar pulp. How about...right. Red wine ice cubes. (From half-used bottles, useful for small cooking amounts.) And yes, the baggies of portioned cooked spinach are easy enough to figure out. But...so that’s what freeze dried garlic cloves look like! Dinners are going to be interesting this month. The refrigerator was a bit easier though I’m still amazed how assorted home made jams and jellies seem to accumulate much faster than I use them.

2018/07/14 10:30

Hmm, so evidently "the contractor window is 9-12" means "the contractor will show up to start work sometime between 9-12...probably closer to 12." This is, at least, better than "the contractor will show up to do the estimate at 8am" meaning "the contractor will ring your doorbell at 7:30am when you are still in your nightgown and sitting on the can."

2018/07/14 13:00

The lovely guys from Lamps Plus installed the ceiling lights in my library. Now I’m inspired to organize the library closet which will remove a bunch of the bankers boxes from the great room. Dreading the task of going through boxes with old financial records and correspondence. Especially now that I’ve gone all paperless for the financial stuff I’m tempted to shred the entirety of the old stuff. Pondering the likelihood that anyone at any point would find value in the paper letters I accumulated back when one did such a thing. 

2018/07/14 22:20

Progress! The library closet is...well, more organized. At the cost of having a large quantity of miscellaneous stuff sitting in a heap on the library floor waiting to be sorted through. The closet has shelves that hold the remaining stock of assorted SCA & Filk publication projects (which have already been written off on my taxes as obsolete and discarded). I should make them available as freebies in appropriate contexts to protect my conscience from simply trashing them.

This is things like: the original paper edition of The History of the West Kingdom, my irregularly-annual medieval Welsh history journal "Y Camamseriad"; the remaining copies of my song collection "Songbook Pusher" as well as remaindered copies of the two filk collections I co-published with Wail Songs. Also all manner of handouts for SCA classes I taught.

The closet also holds old computer-related equipment and supplies that need to be gone through for obsolescence. There's a lot of obsolescence lying around in heaps. An assortment of various types and grades of printer paper. Do you know how long it's been since I actually printed something on my home printer? I don't even use the scanner function of the printer because I can get better resolution just by taking a picture of the document with my phone.

Back in Junior High, we were assigned to read Alvin Toffler's "Future Shock". Toffler had no fucking clue. I turn around and the things I used to rely on to manage my life have become utterly obsolete. And they've been replaced by better things! I have wholeheartedly embraced the concept of living a paperless life to the extent possible. (Except for books. You can pry my books from my cold dead fingers.) But now I'm left staring at heaps and boxes of paper (and the equipment for managing paper) and I'm paralyzed by the inability to simply move on.

I will though. I'm going to double-check the record-retention recommendations for personal financial paperwork, scan a few essential items (I've already done that for all my past tax returns), and then find a local secure shredding service. I'll keep the letters, though I may trash the bundles of old Christmas Cards. I can let go of Christmas Cards.
 

2018/07/tomorrow

I'm dealing with 7 bankers boxes of photocopied journal articles and book excerpts by throwing some money at a teenager to whom I'm loaning my old Mac and sheet feeding scanner. The theory is that I'll receive the computer back with a folder full of pdfs with file names filled in on the bibliography spreadsheet. At that point, even if I never look at any of the articles again, I'll be content to recycle the paper copies. And I actually do use those articles for research. It was one of the first projects I tackled for the Lesbian Historic Motif Project. The vast majority, though are linguistics, Welsh history, and clothing & textiles. I really do intend to pull in a bunch of the Welsh history research in my fiction. (I've been noodling with the 10th century "Viking girl kidnaps Welsh princess" story lately.) I think the moment when I might have done something serious with the surviving garments database has passed, though. It was one of those projects that tickled my data-cataloging fancy, but hit a point where it was not complete enough to really go public in a big way, but too big to be happy about walking away from. Such is life.

I have too much life for one lifetime. And I've reached the age for pruning branches away so that the remaining fruit will ripen properly. And it breaks my heart sometimes.

Comments

[zeborah]

I've started keeping a whiteboard marker next to the freezer, to label things before they go in. Now at least 50% of my freezer contents is labelled....

[hrj]

The only "problem freezer" is the one attached to the refrigerator, which is theoretically meant for things in commercial packaging and for very short-term leftovers. I have a chest freezer in the garage that I use for stuff from the garden (plus the occasional bulk purchase of meat) and that has a spreadsheet as well as individual labeling.

It's those "short term leftovers" that are the main problem.

[kareina]

The SCA songbooks sound interesting, but the expense of postage this far is less so. Could you hand over the surviving garments database to a graduate student who could expand it as part of their research? frualeydis might know of a student doing research in that direction...

[hrj]

I've made various mutterings about handing off the garments database but haven't found anyone who might find it useful yet. I did finally hand off the Welsh names database to DMNES.

Oddly, both projects (as well as the LHMP) are victims of their own success. When I started the surviving garments database, I thought there would be a small manageable amount of data. When I started what would eventually become the LHMP, there *was* only a small manageable amount of data. The Welsh names...well,I just never quite figured out what it wanted to be when it grew up.

[kareina]

If you ever want to find someone who would be interested in adopting the garments database there is a Swedish School of Textiles at the University of Boros. Or, perhaps, one of the people who attend the annual European Textile Forum might be interested.

[hrj]

To some extent, I'm happy to hand it off to any and every one who has an interest. But it's very much an "as is" project. And if I had the time to track down interested parties, I'd probably have the time to continue working on it myself.

[hairmonger]

My inner archivist shudders at the though of disposing of paper. What will future historians do, with the rate of obsolescence of file formats? But I have brought myself to dispose of my old financial records, and although I enjoyed going through my parents' old bank statements from before I was born I did not scan them. (Back before the war my father allowed himself two dollars cash a week to pay for lunches and haircuts and bus fare. The hospital bill, not including the surgeon's fee, but including the anesthesia, for my adenoidectomy in 1955 was sixteen dollars. I really should have saved that one.)

Mary Anne in Kentucky

[hrj]

Exactly. But how do we determine what is and isn't valuable? We're all already drowning in data. Over the years I've put some effort into migrating a lot of documents from one format to another just one step ahead of program obsolescence. Most of it was entirely wasted effort since the content has no value even to me. (Old SCA heraldic commentary anyone?) And realistically, who would bother to go through my old computer files even to see if there were anything interesting there?

Some of the boxes that are still in the "need to sort through this" stack have stuff that's far more sentimental than valuable. I'm getting less sentimental about most of it as time goes by. I suspect to some extent it's an advantage not to have descendants to burden any of it with.

[hairmonger]

I don't find not having any descendants to be at all helpful with this. Instead of being able to pass the historic stuff down for somebody else to deal with, I have to figure out how to preserve it. (For instance, the cherry bed my great-great-grandfather built sometime before 1860 when my great-grandfather, not the oldest child, was born in it. None of my distant cousins want it. What? The paper, such as one of the ledgers from my great-grandfather's business, full of local history interest, even more difficult.)

Mary Anne in Kentucky

[hrj]

There's two sets of stuff to consider. I have a number of genuine family heirlooms: a silver tea service, several pieces of furniture. Those will, of course, be earmarked for appropriate relatives (though since my immediate generation of 4 siblings has only produced one member of the next generation, it's a reason to keep in touch with more distant cousins).

But the things that are new-to-me? Or personal-to-me? There's a certain lack of pressure to impose an expectation of willingness-to-receive. There aren't people who might need to be consulted regarding the disposition of my library or my art projects or my letters. (At one time I had a mutual pact regarding "first pick of this subset of my library if I die" but life circumstances changed and I no longer considered it operative when the time came.)

This sort of rumination always has a chance of feeling morbid, but I've seen too many cases where an unwillingness to prune or let go resulted in a massive emotional burden for one's executor. And to some extent, the unwillingness to prune becomes an emotional burden for *me*. A binding to parallel timelines not followed that are more likely to generate regret than joy.

[threadwalker]

beautiful metaphonr at the end.

And I understand the struggle.