Emptying storage leads to some interesting finds

It's amazing sometimes the kind of things people will box up and store in the garage, or in the closet or under the bed. Or maybe it's just amazing the things that I will box up and store wherever I can find space.

I'm not quite as much of a pat rack as my dad or my sister, but I definitely hold on to things more than other people I know. I think it runs in the family because I remember visiting my grandmother's house when I was a kid and the counters were piled high with stuff. I don't really remember what the stuff was, but it was always there.

When my parents bought a house a few years ago and we moved from a townhouse to the new place, I thought I did a good job of purging all the necessary things in my life. I donated tons of books, DVDs and videos. I emptied out my closet to just the bare necessities. I got rid all the textbooks I'd been holding on to for years - after all, I didn't really need my psych textbooks from 10 years ago.

But it turns out the purge wasn't as good as I assumed it was. Just a few weeks ago, my mom finally decided to empty out a storage she rented before we moved. It was supposed to be a temporary space to throw some stuff until we cleaned the boxes out of the garage and could move it all back home. The garage is still pretty full - and we need to deal with that at some point - but now the contents of the storage are in the living room.

I had a box of old papers from elementary school and high school. I don't know why I would possibly have packed English papers and overheads for biology presentations. But there were a bunch of notebooks with poetry and journals, and creative writing projects, and I couldn't bring myself to toss those out. Even though I write all the time for the paper now, that stuff reminds me that someday I want to get back to that creative stuff.

I also had a bunch of programs from different theater productions, tickets from movies and brochures from when I was in Ireland. I also couldn't bring myself to through any of this stuff out. It's the kind of stuff that would be perfect for a scrapbook - if I scrapbooked. Instead the notebooks and the memorabilia is piled on the floor in my room until I have some free time to sort through all of it and put it with the other stuff stored under my bed.

I also found a pile of old VHS tapes, including a bunch with videos recorded from MTV. One was even labeled as my high school best friend's favorites. There were also about four boxes of random CDs, which I am slowly trying to go through and add to iTunes. Some of the music is really bad stuff - a soundtrack to Young Guns II, Jasmine Guy, Bell Biv Devoe - but some of it is decent. I've added some Beatles, Elton John and a bunch of old school dance music to my iPod.

The one nice surprise in the bunch is that I had a plastic tub full of clothes. It was slacks and shirts from when I worked at San Jose State before graduate school, and none of it fit when I packed it up. But since I've taken up running and working out again, all that stuff fits again. Some of it is out of fashion or I just don't like it anymore, but you can't really go wrong with gray slack pants.

Most of the stuff from the storage is going to be donated, and as for the CDs, anyone who wants some random music just let me know because we're not quite sure what to do with it all. It always feels good to toss out some of the clutter.