A1 Great! Part lies, part heart, part truth, part garbage.

taking stock

As people who exist in a world of forms and documents and receipts tucked away here and there, we are a family surrounded by paper. It’s tiresome, but necessary – did I ever tell you the one about how my taxes were audited because of our special medical and caregiving expenses? Our column of numbers caught someone’s attention over at the CRA, and it was a good thing that Jennifer and I are as disciplined as we should be about keeping every shred of evidence that, yes, we did spend over $150 on diapers last month, for instance.

Listen n’ read: The White Stripes - Astro

One thing we are not disciplined at, however, is making sure that those forms and documents and receipts are filed in the right place, for posterity’s sake. Stacks of the latest evidence of money spent were growing in the kitchen, in the basement, and in the living room, and I was kind of tired of it. So last weekend we decided to start tidying up, labeled some file folders correctly, sorted the pulp from the chaff, chucked a bunch of crap in the fireplace. Freedom!

In the process of putting anything old away, however, there is always some opportunity to unearth even older and more interesting things, and then a diversion into evaluation of whether an item deemed ‘must keep until dead’ a year ago, three years ago, or ten years ago is still deserving of that designation.

Case in point: film. Remember film? The stuff you used to have to put in cameras in order to take pictures? We were so primitive once!

If you’re anything like us, you probably have several dozen sheets of negatives sitting around. Good stuff – wedding photos, for instance. Once upon a time, that’d be essential, hands down, and no questions asked – keep forever! But times have changed. The number of places one could take negatives to get reprinted into something physical is a small fraction of what it was in 2002, and who ever gets reprints of wedding photos eight years after the fact, anyway? Will film negatives be a recognizable artifact in another eight years, or will I need to spend a day finding the one print place left in Ottawa, only to pay a thousand bucks for the dude behind the counter to crank up some dusty old reproduction relic of his own?

The consensus around these parts was as follows: chuck ‘em. Yet the pile still sits on my desk, waiting to make that long trip from the basement, to the bin, to the curb, to the truck, and to the landfill. Gone forever. Thanks for everything! Easier said than done, I guess.

How about you? Still socking your negatives away somewhere? VHS tapes? Cassettes? Floppy disks? Does obsolescence in the outside world turn your media into junk, or do you hold on in the name of ‘just in case’?

This is a single weblog entry, posted here on February 21st, 2010 3 Comments »

3 replies to this post so far:

· On February 21st, 2010 at 4:40 pm, Julie UKnowWho wrote:

Dan… You’ve just described my life. But no one living here is motivated to do a thing about it, sadly. I have piles EVERYWHERE! On counters, on top of the fridge, beside the bed… under the bed. It’s a neverending bloody nightmare, I tell you!
See…someone does read your entries once you direct us to them…

· On February 21st, 2010 at 5:36 pm, lisa wrote:

You should see Dad’s pile of VHS tapes. He keeps them “just in case”. I threw out negatives years ago as well as floppy disks.

· On February 21st, 2010 at 10:00 pm, Joyd wrote:

Ha! Yeah, I still had most of those until recently… even the floppies just in case I can find an old computer slow enough for me to play my old “JetFighter 2″ game that I loved so much. You could, if you’re hesitant to throw away the stuff completely, just back it up to digital. I’m sure you can scan negatives (I even think there’s an adapter or scanner specifically for that) and save them to digital.

Last year I copied all my old floppies, as well as some vhs and audio cassette stuff, over to my computer so that I could get rid of the physical bulk without losing the good stuff. Worked out pretty well.

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part lies, part heart, part truth, part garbage

“There’s always a siren singing you to shipwreck.” – There There, Radiohead