May day

It is hard to believe that it is already May, and 1/3 of the year is already behind us. By now my brother and cousins should be visiting somewhere in Italy, either Rome or Naples, a trip I was going to go on but decided against.

My daughter Hillary should be up to her ears in fiber this weekend, because if memory serves me correctly this is the weekend for the Maryland Sheep and Wool festival, Something she has been looking forward to for a very long time, actually since the festival last year. Her knitting tournament is down to the final four and the pattern for this round is a very complicated two color intricate design. Should keep the contestants busy for a while.

Every once in a while I get ambitious and take on a project. Like most people, well, maybe only like some people, I keep very meticulous records. I keep everything, tax returns, credit card receipts, bills, statements, etc. Why, you might ask, because you never know when you might need something, like a tax audit. Tax returns, and the supporting records of course, get saved for four years, and the return itself gets saved forever.

But then there is other stuff. Records of other activities that no longer matter, such as tax returns for my company which was dissolved some four years ago, or the records for the first incorporation which is now ten years old. So I started going through the boxes of records, I had garbage bags on one side and the shredder on the other. Things with my name or signature got shredded, the rest got round-filed. I must have filled up eight to ten garbage bags full of stuff, and emptied the shredded bucket five or six times.

Now the easy thing would have been to dump it all, enmasse, but mixed in with all that paper are records that are still needed; home improvement bills, bills for appliances that I still use, etc. So I had to go through everything before disposing of it. That made a short job, very much longer.

Fortunately tomorrow is trash collect day. So everything is out by the curb, the original bags tightly sealed in big heavy plastic barrel sized trash bags, tied very tightly so nothing will blow away (I hope!)