The Junk Drawer

"Hate" is a strong word but I use it eagerly when referring to it. Every house seems to have one but I despise ours.

The Junk Drawer!

It grows and flourishes when feed anything: crayons, wrappers, tiny slips of paper with addresses on them, broken pens, hardware come loose from other things, keys, twisty ties ...anything. It grows till it spills from it's lair or traps its hulking mass inside the drawer it calls home by wedging portions of its extremities so one may not gain entrance to it’s domain.

The need arises often in our home for some brave soul to venture into the unknown and vanquish the evil that has taken root there in. His reward in the end is often the retrieval of tiny trophies of little or questionable worth from the beast’s horde. The battery cover to a channel changer, a quarter here, an ancient canisters of what was called "camera film" containing unknown images from past eons...This list is diverse but in the end it seems that the questionable value the individual items is what this drawer thrives on. The statement "We can't throw that away, it may be important..." is the qualifying question on the entrance exam to the junk drawer.

I hate it but somehow the brave hero never manages to kills the beast in its entirety. Once down to a meager size, the hero always takes pity on the poor evil drawer and stays the death blow, allowing it to live on. Somehow the hero knows the battle will rage on another day but allows the monster to retreat back to its lair for the time while he returns from his quest proudly displaying the spoils of war.

As we clean around here in preparation for the future selling of our home, we get to review all the stuff we have accumulated over the past few years. It all falls into the following categories.

1. Highly Useful and of High Worth
2. Low-useful but of Worth
3. Useful but of low worth
4. Not-useful and of low worth

The first and last are easy to decipher, it’s the middle ones that seem to stick around in the junk drawers of houses and life.

As far as physical things go, the best way we have found to get rid of some stuff in category 2 is to “digitize” it when possible. We take a picture of it and toss it when we can. The above picture of our junk drawer is like something out of an I-spy book but if you pull a few items out at a time we can snap a picture and capture the memory (the thing of worth) and toss the useless item. It does its job…

I laughed at a program I saw once on a business trip about “hoarders” who save every little thing. I can't laugh too loudly at them now because I guess "them is me" to a small degree.

Daddy currently reading: John Adams by David McCullough
Favorite meal: Cafe Rio Sprite Chicken with Naan