They say that any box you haven’t opened in 5 years probably contains nothing you really desperately need. There is wisdom in this, and I have, at the top of my back closet, three boxes, labelled "Rob’s Desk", which were packed when we moved into this apartment in 2007, and have been sitting up on the top shelf untouched ever since.

Because of the above axiom, it was tempting to just take the boxes down, and toss them in the dumpster. But I knew there WAS one valuable thing up there, which was the boxes themselves. So tonight, pulled each one down and went through them, sorting the (very few) keepable things from the trash. Most of it was the usual assortment of old bills and papers that should have been discarded years ago and instead wound up in an increasing strata of desk drawer until it was transferred, unsorted and unexamined, into a box on moving day. But there were some things unearthed that, while of varying levels of value, were at least amusingly interesting and an insight into my packrat nature. They included:

  • A Consonance 2007 program book and song book
  • D&D character sheets for a campaign that ended when the Suttons moved to Indiana
  • Cheques with our old address, obsolete since 2007
  • Family photo from reunion in 2004
  • Two envelopes of Kitanzi’s pay stubs, some dating back to when she lived in New Hampshire
  • A Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 video card (with 64MB of vRAM!)
  • A strand of Mardi Gras beads
  • Christmas card/Family photo from J., dated 2000, featuring one more wife and one fewer son than he has currently
  • A compact tool kit
  • A variety of CDs, both labeled and unlabled
  • A menu from a restaurant that closed some years ago
  • A laptop-sized ram chip with 256MB of PC133 ram
  • A Radio Shack branded widgit that looks like an S-Video to RCA adapter
  • 2 USB to PS/2 adapters.
  • A Microsoft Windows Services for Unix 3.5 CD
  • A map of Paragon City from the original 2004 release of City of Heroes
  • Program books from Gafilks 3, 5, 7 and 8.

I seriously need to do something about my packrat tendencies.  *examines state of current desk*  And, like, soon…