Excavating The Garage

It's been a couple of weeks since I've been able to do anything with my Five Year Plan. Life got in the way.

I finally got back to the garage yesterday. I went through two large boxes of documents. One box was almost completely toss-and-shredable. Mostly old research on special education or other disability issues from the 90s. The other box was genealogy research I did back around 2000-2002. That box had some valuable papers -- copies of old birth and death certificates, wills, etc. But I did toss a lot of copies of genealogy website dox on random people, some I couldn't even identify. As if I were following a lead that led to a possibly related person that led to another lead. Today, 15 years later, I doubt I could even figure out my train of thought on those leads if I tried. So, I managed to lighten the genealogy load by more than half.

I tossed old "hornbooks" from law school, too. I had kept those way too long -- they were a significant investment and resource when I bought them, but they are of no use today. If I ever were to have a question about antitrust or evidence, I'd have no business consulting a 40-year old law book.

That left me with enough shelf space to get some boxes off the garage floor. Moving around space! Tomorrow I will start painting just one wall of the living room. I don't want to paint the entire living room until next summer, but one wall is a wine color, accent wall. Against that wall is a large bookshelf/hutch I want to sell. I can't even take a picture of it right now, because the color of the bookcase just fades into the color of the wall! So I have to paint the one wall.

Tossing the books got me to thinking about books I have that I want to take back to the east coast. I think the U.S. Post Office's Media Mail may be the least expensive way to ship books across country. You can ship up to 70 lbs for under $36. However, I saw some on-line reviews warning against shipping too much in one box: the heavier the box, the more risk of damage to the books. They also suggested labeling the boxes, Fragile. What I should do now is start sorting my books into those to sell at a garage sale and those I want to keep. Of the keepers, if I don't foresee using them over the next couple of years, I could start boxing them for shipment ahead of time.

Reading through all those old files -- IDEA and 504 complaints on behalf of my son, pro bono cases, old law school books, the genealogy research -- It's like I'm an archeologist, digging through my life. "As a culture, Humanis Deffensis was unique in its unusual attention to the rights of the disabled, coupled with an  obsessive and, quite frankly, incomprehensible interest in familial origins, and a passing interest in laws."