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Getting rid of stuff
In the aftermath of some minor basement flooding two weeks ago, I looked for things in the basement that are in cardboard boxes directly on the floor. One large box was labelled "Class Notes", so I brought it upstairs to triage. It consists of spiral-bound notebooks from college and grad school. After opening and flipping briefly through each notebook, I put almost all of them into the recycling bin on grounds that I will never need their contents again in this lifetime. There were some mind-blowing proofs of various theorems (linear coding theory, complex analysis, number theory, mathematical logic, computational complexity...), but I know I'll never need them. I kept out a few, on subjects like Combinatorial Algorithms and Parallel Complexity that I could remotely imagine needing, or at least wanting to re-read for real, in this lifetime, but I'll probably recycle those too.
I didn't see any notebooks of outgoing lecture notes from my 20 years as a college professor; not sure whether I've already recycled those, or whether there's another large box of them lurking in the basement. The closest I found were a couple of folders of pre- and post-workshop evaluation forms from my summer workshops for high school computer science teachers. And yes, I recycled those. There was a hand-written note, a week after a workshop, from one particularly impressed high school teacher, but after re-reading it and getting a warm fuzzy feeling, I recycled that too.
There are a bunch of other cardboard boxes in the basement still to be triaged. Some are relatively-safely up on steel shelving units, so those are lower priority, but still legitimate targets. There are at least two boxes of rarely-used cookbooks that we moved to the basement when the kitchen renovation changed our cookbook-storage situation. There are several boxes of miscellaneous decor that we don't have enough wall space to hang up; those will be difficult because some of the contents have sentimental value to one or the other of us.
I didn't see any notebooks of outgoing lecture notes from my 20 years as a college professor; not sure whether I've already recycled those, or whether there's another large box of them lurking in the basement. The closest I found were a couple of folders of pre- and post-workshop evaluation forms from my summer workshops for high school computer science teachers. And yes, I recycled those. There was a hand-written note, a week after a workshop, from one particularly impressed high school teacher, but after re-reading it and getting a warm fuzzy feeling, I recycled that too.
There are a bunch of other cardboard boxes in the basement still to be triaged. Some are relatively-safely up on steel shelving units, so those are lower priority, but still legitimate targets. There are at least two boxes of rarely-used cookbooks that we moved to the basement when the kitchen renovation changed our cookbook-storage situation. There are several boxes of miscellaneous decor that we don't have enough wall space to hang up; those will be difficult because some of the contents have sentimental value to one or the other of us.