Funny treasures

So my quest for sifting through my accumulated junk has been interesting. For the most part it's given me some time to remember some fun memories. Memories seem to be attached to "stuff". Still, I have to laugh at myself, as I sometimes pride myself on being a very organized, not collecting, non-cluttery person. Reality proves me wrong! Well, half way. Yes, I'm quite organized, enough so that even my closet is organized by color. Want to wear a green shirt? No need to filter through all your clothes because all of the green shirts are together. Feeling like a yellow shirt day, look no further.

So with that type of organization, one would ask why do I have a nicely packed file folder full of every paycheck stub I ever earned? Yes, you read it right. I have every stub since I began working 1987. I worked straight for 14 years until I was able to quit and raise Daria. Fortunately I'm in the "if it's not needed, let it go attitude" right now. So I decided to shred them. But before I did, the genealogist in me decided to write my work history. It was easy, because I had all the stubs. It was fun actually. It was fun to see what I first earned in 1987. A whopping $3.35 per hour. Can you imagine! It was fun to reminisce. I never had a job I didn't like. I've always had good work experiences and chalk that up partially to my positive happy go lucky attitude. The greatest job I had was the last one I had which I worked for approximately 10 years at. Loved it but not enough to trade it for raising my children. I remember that every paycheck I felt like a millionaire. For some reason working hard and earning money really helped my self esteem, even at $3.35 an hour. I reminisced through my last job where I started at $7.85 per hour in 1992 (before that I worked there through a temp service) and within 5 years was making $14.60 per hour. I had almost forgot about the double bonus in 1997 because my counterpart and I saved the company money by bringing our container graphics in house. I remember the surprise when I was made manager in 1998, and all those work politics that came with that. But it was fun. I still to this day keep in touch with several of my previous co-workers.

On to other funny things I've held on to all these years. 14 floppie disks. Why? I'm not sure. I wanted to see what was on them before I destroyed them, but it's been so long, I don't even have a floppy drive in the house!!! 2 computers and 1 laptop, and some old junk laptops and not one floppy drive. I call my neighbor friend. They have about 5+ computers (her husband is a computer geek too) and no floppy drives.... oh wait, she ends up finding one on her sons game computer. Thrilled I frolic on over. Floppy drive works of course, but the computer has no USB port, so instead of being able to drop the files onto my external hard drive I have to e-mail them one at a time to myself. Crazy! Funny thing is a lot of the disks were old work disks. You may ask why they were at home, that was because in 2001 I then worked for the same company for a year from home. Files are transferred, disks are destroyed. One less thing taking up space.

Now I feel like I'm making progress. I've made a usable path in the spare bedroom with all this stuff. Now sorting it into piles, e-Bay, Goodwill, Craig's list and maybe some Freecycle. On Thursday I put my first item from my de-junking on e-BAy at 4pm. The item sold by 8pm. Wow! I've sold other things on e-Bay but none went that fast. One item down, who knows how many more to go.