The joys and dangerous of a spring cleanup

Spring seems to be finally making some headway into Finland, with temperatures reaching +12C today. With every spring, there comes some sort of a desire to clean up a little at home. If you ignore the urge long enough, you can get away without actually doing anything about it – but unlike most springs, this spring we actually went ahead and started doing a major spring cleanup. And when you do that, at least the following observations can be made:

• People gather amazing amount of useless stuff over the years; all unused storage space eventually becomes inundated.
• Much of the supposedly important stuff becomes gradually less and less important over the years until it’s just junk taking up space.
• Most small kitchen appliances are evil; for example, who needs a multi-function kitchen machine when you have a good blender and a set of knives? And just how often do you use that fondue pot? Or the egg / rice / water / some other stupid cooker?
• People say “Your junk is someone else’s treasure”, and sometimes it’s true: you can indeed sell some of your junk. Sometimes, however, junk is just junk.
• You have too many of them anyway. This applies to lots of things; I had maybe 20 kitchen knives – I only ever use three of them, four max. The rest? Junk. I have hundreds of books, but how many of them do I read even occasionally? Not hundreds, that’s for sure. The rest? Junk.
• Finnish climate sucks – you actually do need like ten types of clothing minimum (see this old post from three years ago).

I wrote about clutter about a year ago and I can now wholeheartedly agree, along with 66% of the population, with the statement “It makes me feel better when I get rid of some of the clutter in my home”.

This isn’t important, and neither is this or this … hey wait a minute!

There are also dangers in cleanups, especially if one is a bit over-zealous in the execution phase. A day after throwing away lots of old books that nobody, including myself, wanted, I was looking for a pile of library books I was supposed to return to the library. I couldn’t find it anywhere and neither could my wife, so she told me to go check the trash, just in case. So I’m thinking “no way are they there”, but after enough unsuccessful searching at home I did go check, just in case.

Turns out it’s a good thing the trash room isn’t emptied every day. I found the library books sitting neatly in their own paper bag, along with lots of other books that I actually intended to throw away.

*oops*.

Oh cool – but what the heck is it?

Finally, one of the joys of doing an inventory of things is finding weird stuff. Like this one below; DVDExpress was an excellent store for ordering DVDs from some 10-15 years back and I used them extensively. One time I found this card along with my order:

I still have no clue whatsoever what that’s supposed to mean. But it was weird enough for me to keep it all these years – until now. Now I tossed it.