I'm back

I finally managed, with help from blogger support, to get access to my blog again. So I'll start posting some more entries, and some pictures of Krakow in the next few days.

Meanwhile, I am back home and desperately going through all of my belongings, trying to sort out what to take with me, what to get rid of and what to keep here. For those of you who are thinking of doing an early spring cleaning, I highly recommend it. It's been about 5 years since I did a big purge of my stuff, and I wish I had done it sooner.

It feels good to get rid of stuff. And at the same time, I have been taking trips back to my youth, reading old love letters, notes from high school friends, and digging through tons of old photos. I decided that I should keep my old team photos of the Oilers (back in the glory days), although I did throw out my newspaper clippings of Torvil and Dean.

One thing that kept amazing me as I read through old letters was the amount of correspondence I kept up in my late teens and early twenties. All before email! I must have been constantly writing letters!

The letters pretty much stop about 10 years ago - damn email. After all, who keeps all their emails? Even if you do file them, if you are like me, you'll never back up, and eventually lose your hard drive, so they'll just be gone. Although I am happy I don't have to lug more boxes around with me, I am going to miss having the physical record of all my correspondence since I stopped writing letters.

Same thing with photos - after going through boxes of negatives, I was pretty happy that I have a digital camera. But I never print photos out anymore, and rarely look at them online. There's something to be said about having a tangible object to hold in your hand.

Finally, in some weird twist of fate, my mother has decided to clean out her house at the same time, and every time she phones me, she goes through lists of things of mine she still has stored. So not only do I have to clean out my home, I have to do a virtual housecleaning of my parents house every time I talk to them! It's a bit too much of a good thing.