digitalphiltrum

we lost a good friend this week. j’s dog, winston, passed away on tuesday. he wasn’t exactly a well-behaved dog, he certainly wasnt pretty, or clean, and definitely not quiet – he snored like a hippo with a pinecone in each nostril – but he was a good companion, a sweet dog and ten times funnier than any reality tv show. he was loved greatly and will be missed.

i have too much stuff. im aware of this. it didnt seem so bad until i bought a house a year ago and was forced to collect all of my stuff from all the different places i had been storing things over the years and put it all together in one place. earlier this year i began a sort of purging – i say sort of because it was short lived – i selected a bunch of things i was no longer using or needed and moved them to the basement. i told myself i would have to make a run out to goodwill sometime soon, but of course that never happened.

to add to the collection, in april i was forced to throw a deadbeat room mate out and he left a bunch of furniture and other things behind. this was not totally unexpected- the jerk was a loser alcoholic who tried to break into my house one night. he was too drunk to open the door with his key like a normal person so he tried to bust the window out instead. unfortunately he was also too drunk to even do that, so he only managed to break out one of the double panes. the next day i threw him out, which wasnt really the 30 days he had been promised in the lease, so i knew he would stiff me the money he owed me (and the money he promised to pay for the window), but i didnt expect him to leave all his crap behind as well. i really had no where to put it and i had to get another room mate very quickly, so all that stuff was thrown into the basement as well.

this past weekend, i happened to make a run down to the basement to look for something i thought might have gotten mixed in with deadbeat room mate’s stuff. what i found was that the humidity that had been building up in my basement all summer was a lot worse than i thought – dead beat roommates stuff was all covered with mold. upon further inspection i found that a lot of MY stuff was covered with mold too. so a giant emergency cleanup was necessary.

the plus side of this is that i was forced to throw out a lot of stuff i had been hanging onto because “you never know when you might need it”. i try to avoid this mentality for the most part, coming from a family of compulsive hoarders, but sometimes i convince myself i have good reason to keep things. the majority of these things have some sort of sentimental value to them. i keep old t-shirts that resemble swiss cheese more than clothing because “it was my favorite shirt in college!” (one of like, 300), or things people who used to be important to me gave me, or random things that make me laugh because theyre just that stupid, or things that i came into possession of at a certain point in my life that have that memory associated with them, etc….you get the picture. i get emotionally attached to stuff.

(note that this is not the case with deadbeat room mate’s stuff – i kept his stuff because i literally had a week to clean out the entire room, paint it, clean the carpet, and replace the closet door and i was also taking 2 classes at the time, so the most efficient thing to do with that stuff was just to make it out of sight for a while. then i got lazy and forgot about it.)

the point of course is that i recognize that i keep certain things because they remind me of a person that i used to be, someone i guess i have not quite let go of yet. i recognize that this is an issue, on many levels, and that maybe its time i start to get rid of that stuff. i mean, honestly, do i really need every paper coaster and glass i stole, um, acquired, from every bar i visited during my college years? and what about all those mardi gras beads that i “earned”? or the rubber duckies i pulled out of the trash during an early may dumpster diving expedition? do i still need that crap? no. probably not. but hey, isnt it cool that i still have it!?

so this weekend was a good starting point for cleaning out the basement. this morning at 7:30AM, the garbage men sanitary collection agents, took away 2 full garbage bags of stuff i dont really need and probably wont miss all that much – junk really. also, dead beat room mate’s shoes, sheets, pillows and some magazines.

i will say however, i did not throw away MY OWN shoes that had some mold on them. that would be horrible. those two pairs were my halloween-costume-butchiest-shoes-ever-shoes and my just-in-case-of-hiking-expedition-or-sudden-ice-storm-boots. very important!

so i hate to admit that its been almost 6 months since i last blogged on here, but it has. i didnt die, didnt run away, just hit a very busy patch, followed by some drama and then just wanted some time off. so i took it. its a blog, i can do that. so..busy patch? school was a bitch this spring. i took 2 classes, one on networking and one on best java practices. the networking one was easy, just time-consuming. the java class however turned out to be a huge mistake. it wasnt me, it was the class (no really! it was!). i took the class because 1. its required and 2. it had no pre-req requirements and, as i have finally just started my required classes after several semesters of catching up (i dont hold a BS in comp sci, so to get an MS in comp sci, i had to take catch up classes), it seemed like a good idea to start with what appears to be the easier classes. only one thing went wrong – no one ever told the professor that the class didnt have any pre-reqs. at least, im assuming they didnt, because he continued to teach the class at a much higher level than the students were at, and we complained and banded together to help each other, but in the end, i couldnt keep up. so i was going to drop it and i asked the professor about my grades and if there was any way i could do extra work to catch up or anything and he told me that he knew he was teaching at a higher level than the class was at and that he would grade on effort not on numbers. “just keep trying, youll be fine” he says. HA. so then he fails me and tells me i failed simply because the numbers didnt add up and it didnt matter how much time i put into it because i still didnt produce a quality product. so much for grading on effort. i have a ton of other examples of how he was a sucky professor, but the heart of the issue was the colleges inability to assess its own courses and communicate the requirements to the professors. so yeah, i failed. and i protested the grade to the department chair, because i found it completely unfair. in the end, i won, they gave me a C after months of review and several meetings with me and the professor (it also helps that several students complained that the class was being taught at a higher level than was originally stated in the curriculum), but that was the drama of most of my june and july. plus there was a trip to ny in there and several concerts and events. not to mention ive been building a fence, piece by piece, in my backyard all summer (yes, i know a professional could have done it in one afternoon, but im poor and cheap), so that also has been keeping me busy.

but now that the fence is almost complete – emphasis on ALMOST – and the grade issue has been resolved, im back. there are no more vacations scheduled before august and ive decided for now not to take any fall classes , so i can go back to studying java on my own time and finally editing all those vacation pictures and the such and posting them up on the interwebs for everyone to see.

maybe if i promise in writing to blog every day for the next 30 days someone will hold me to that…

or of course i could just say that and then disappear for another 6 months. who knows.