{"id":4531,"date":"2010-10-06T13:28:13","date_gmt":"2010-10-06T18:28:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/?p=4531"},"modified":"2016-08-14T13:47:06","modified_gmt":"2016-08-14T18:47:06","slug":"five-things-i-couldnt-throw-away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/2010\/10\/06\/five-things-i-couldnt-throw-away\/","title":{"rendered":"Five things I couldn&#8217;t throw away"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"drop_cap\">A<\/span>s I&#8217;m packing, I keep having these great ideas for blog posts that will never get written, because they&#8217;ll either be no longer relevant or (more likely) completely forgotten by the time my life slows down enough to allow for regular blogging again.  Some ideas that will likely never see the light of day:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Five things we won&#8217;t tell the new homeowners<\/li>\n<li>A love letter to my packing tape gun<\/li>\n<li>Five reasons to never hire my real estate agent<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Today, I&#8217;ve been packing the stuff from my dresser into boxes.  (Sidebar: does this seem as ridiculous to you as it does to me?  Every other time I&#8217;ve moved, I&#8217;ve simply removed the [full] dresser drawers, carried them out to the truck, put them down in a stack, carried down the frame, put the drawers back in the frame, and repeated the whole process in reverse at the destination.  Now I&#8217;m told that I&#8217;m supposed to pack the drawer stuff in boxes. Meh.)<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, ahem, yes, I have been packing the contents of my dresser drawers into boxes.  My dresser has three big drawers for t-shirts and jammies and stuff, and four much smaller drawers, perfectly-sized for underwear and scarves.  One of these drawers is full of the little bits of memorabilia and nostalgia that I&#8217;ve been keeping for so long that I couldn&#8217;t possibly part with it now, regardless of how ultimately useless it might be.  I know for a fact that when we arrive in the new house, I will take this stuff out of the shoe box in which it has been transported, put it back into its little drawer, and mostly never look at it again until we move in 15 more years.  I don&#8217;t need this stuff, but I can&#8217;t part with it.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/postcardsfromthemothership\/5057844616\/\" title=\"From the drawer by Dani_Girl, on Flickr\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm5.static.flickr.com\/4084\/5057844616_511c683765.jpg\" class=\"frame aligncenter\" width=\"500\" height=\"333\" alt=\"From the drawer\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s a selection of five random pieces from that drawer:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li><strong>John Olerud rookie card in plastic shield<\/strong><\/li>\n<p>This is, in fact, but a single card of the many, many baseball cards I have.  They are left over from another life, some from my childhood and some from the practice marriage, when I thought the most interesting thing about me was that I knew a lot about baseball and watched nearly every televised Blue Jays game in the 1993 season.  I also have a cap on which I collected the signatures of most of the World Series winning lineup in 1992, and a full set of McDonalds ball cards circa the early 1990s.  And I&#8217;m about six cards short of the full set of 525 Topps cards from the 1971 season.<\/p>\n<li><strong>My Carleton University student card<\/strong><\/li>\n<p>I attended Carleton from September to December 1988, before I unceremoniously dropped out to work full time as a cashier at Zellers.  Definitely not one of my more inspired life choices, and yet even after graduating magna cum laude through the University of Ottawa, I can&#8217;t part with this old student card.<\/p>\n<li><strong>The key to my first car<\/strong><\/li>\n<p>It was a little black Mazda 323 hatchback.  I loved that car to death, literally.  Did you know you can drive a car more than 60,000 km without an oil change and it will still go? Even though we traded it in for a fancy red Sunfire with a sunroof in 1998, I like having that key around.  It reminds me of how far I&#8217;ve come.<\/p>\n<li><strong>An old Watchmen bumper sticker<\/strong><\/li>\n<p>I have no idea why I have this.  But I&#8217;ve had it for close to 20 years, so it must be at least valuable if not actually important, right?  (C&#8217;mon, you remember the Watchmen, right? Boneyard Tree?  I got this when they played the front lawn of the Supreme Court building, about a million years ago.)<\/p>\n<li><strong>A card from my mom, circa 1989<\/strong><\/li>\n<p>For my practice wedding, I carried a bouquet of stargazer lillies.  One day in the months leading up to the wedding, my mom send me a silk version of my bouquet in a little vase, and this card was in the box.  The flowers and the first husband have long since been relegated to the junk heap of history, but I&#8217;ve kept this little card for no reason whatsoever except my mom gave it to me.<\/p>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Five things that I didn&#8217;t take a picture of but also didn&#8217;t throw away:  the letter spelling out the drug protocol for our infertility treatments, the paper where we kept track of Tristan&#8217;s diaper contents for the first three weeks of his life, a little keychain with a viewmaster-like picture of my friends and me at Canada&#8217;s Wonderland in 1986, a cassette tape my grandparents recorded for me in 1977, and the slip of paper where Beloved wrote his mailing address out for me on the weekend we met and fell in love, just before I made the six-hour drive back to Ottawa in the aforementioned little black Mazda.<\/p>\n<p>Surely I&#8217;m not the only sentimental fool in the room.  If I rifled through your secret cache of memorabilia, what would I find?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As I&#8217;m packing, I keep having these great ideas for blog posts that will never get written, because they&#8217;ll either be no longer relevant or (more likely) completely forgotten by the time my life slows down enough to allow for regular blogging again. Some ideas that will likely never see the light of day: Five &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/2010\/10\/06\/five-things-i-couldnt-throw-away\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Five things I couldn&#8217;t throw away&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[81,109,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-5-things","category-happy-home","category-life-the-universe-and-everything"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4531"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4531\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12000,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4531\/revisions\/12000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/danigirl.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}