It started innocently enough ...

I've heard horror stories about people whose blogs inadvertently were erased or otherwise corrupted, so I decided this morning that I would back up my blog by printing out each of the entries. I'm still working on that, but I figured that while I was waiting for the printouts I would find a binder big enough to hold them all. Not a problem, as this house is apparently Where Empty Binders Go To Die ... I can reach six of them, just from my desk, not counting some that are probably squirreled away in the attic or have been given away or sold at yard sales.

But the Honking Big Blue Binder I wanted wasn't currently empty - it had all of the old bills for utilities at our house in Cleveland. Don't ask me why we've been keeping them - initially it was "we'll keep them until we get all the accounts closed and I've got the refund checks recorded," then it was "I've got too many other things to do to spend an hour shredding all that stuff when I don't need the space that badly." So here we are, two years later, with all of our old cable bills and water meter readings gathering dust in my office.

Shredding documents is one of those chores that I know I SHOULD do, but for some reason I just loathe the task. It could be because I have a junky shredder that will only take two - possibly three - sheets of paper at a time without jamming, and that overheats after about 15 minutes of shredding, and that has to be emptied every five minutes because the container is so small. So shredding gets put off, and put off, and put off. For example, when we started collecting the 2005 tax information I realized we could go ahead and destroy the 1997 and 1998 tax stuff, so I brought the files down from the attic and put them on the floor next to my desk. The intention was to shred them sometime while I was waiting for something else to happen at the computer - burning a CD or something. That was in January ... and I just got around to shredding the stuff today. Yes, I had two thick files of tax stuff sitting on the floor of my office for close to FIVE MONTHS, that's how much I hate shredding. And the longer it sits, the more stuff accumulates, and the longer the shredding will take. It's a never-ending cycle of annoyance, this whole shredding thing.

So all morning I've been shredding tax stuff, and old utility bills, and I've just started on the box of credit card receipts that are so old we actually packed them and moved them down here with all the rest of our stuff two years ago. Thanks to the insanely detailed nature of some of the receipts, if you want to know what brand of tampon I was using in 2002, I can find out for you pretty quickly. I'm currently waiting for the overheated shredder to come back to life (for the third time) and trying to find more trash bags for all of the shredded goodness. Anyone need three trash bags full of excellent packing material?? Just don't tape the pieces back together to figure out what types of produce we were buying in 2000 ...