Tearing up the basement

I have to say that yesterday was a very trying and tiring day, and I come out of it only half fulfilled.  I needed to track down two receipts from the moving company, and I found one (towards the very end of the evening).  I am kind of wracking my brains where the other one could be, since it should have been quite close to the other one.  Before I completely give up, there is one box that I can flip through a second time.

It wasn't a total loss.  I found a few more papers affirming my BC residence.  I threw out a lot of old papers (nowhere near enough, however).  I managed to consolidate 6 boxes down into 3, so it looks somewhat neater downstairs.

I think the next time I go through the boxes, I'll throw out everything related to my field work at the Chicago Youth Hostel.  I am never, ever going to write anything related to that experience.  I really ought to throw out all the newspaper clippings related to Chicago transportation, since the important ones were already cited in my dissertation, and I am quite unlikely to publish more in that area either.  Maybe I can give myself another 6 months and then really start to purge.

I also turned up a handful of CDs, though there are still a few cases with missing CDs.  These are the trickiest, since it is likely the missing CDs are mixed in with a bunch of data CDs (and I must have literally over a thousand downstairs!).  And I found all the parts to my son's bike lock, which reminds me that I was very remiss in not having him practice biking this summer.  The problem is we are in a neighborhood surrounded by busy streets, which are not too bad for walking but biking is a real challenge, and I don't feel comfortable yet having him navigate so much traffic.  Next summer perhaps...

Probably the single best find was a small orange notebook which contains the science fiction story "No More Robinsons," as well as just a few pages of "Final Exam."  I had it in the back of my mind that I had started this, but couldn't track it down, so I actually started from scratch while on vacation a couple of weeks ago.  Now I can compare the two and see which was the better start.

There are a few things that I still can't find, in some cases I have been looking since we moved.  The most baffling is that I can't find the hair clippers, which is in a fairly large black case.  I also can't find the cassette player that allows me to convert cassettes to mp3s, though I admit I wasn't really looking for it until the very end of the day.  I have a small bag of refrigerator magnets I hope to track down.  I'm also missing a couple of USB flash drives, but those went missing recently, so they can't be buried downstairs, just somewhere on the main floor or at work.*

Obviously, this isn't the last time I will have to spend a day down in the basement sorting through papers and other random junk.

* One of the USB drives turned up, and hopefully the other one will soon.