Digging through your old stuff

Hello readers,

I'm voyaging back to school in about a week, and before leaving am trying to get my things at home in order. Part of this task is cleaning out a morass of old stuff piled around my house. My room has three closest, a gap under my bed, and a bunch of large drawers beneath my work desk, and all of them are bursting full of paraphernalia.

What have I kept you ask? Rather than try to describe the group as a whole, I'd like to share an item or two to illustrate the randomness.

A broken Taj Mahal statue from an ex-girlfriend
Some swiss money
A nearly life-sized 3d puzzle bust of Darth Vader
A stuffed cloth catfish that is longer than I am tall
A blob of melted plastic that used to be my favorite army men until I sent them on a mission to hide in a house lamp and my unknowing grandma turned the lamp on
Nearly every Where's Waldo, Redwall, and Tolkien book ever printed

The stuff that I will never use again but can't bring myself to get rid of goes on, and on, and on.

When I was laughing and showing the Vader bust to a friend of my mom's over for lunch, she had a great idea, which is why I am writing to you today.

Her thought was that, since we all have these kinds of things we just don't need but can't throw away, we could take pictures of them to remember them by and get rid of them. What if we took these pictures and put them in an album?

I think this idea protects the real importance of old stuff, the memories associated with them, without sacrificing much. Another plus side is that since old junk usually has really cool stories behind it, if a few people made photo albums of this kind and got together to share them over a few drinks, there would no doubt be plenty of surprises.

Maybe your life is too cluttered as well and this is worth a shot?
I think mine is.

Here's to a simpler life and being able to find things in less than an hour,
TW