Helping her fight

Rachel has the collector gene. I know it. Heather knows it.

These reading glasses broke recently. To avoid her keeping them for an unknown art project to come, I skipped the step that might come a few years down the line and quietly put them in my nearby waste basket.

Yes, you can call me mean, but since she doesn’t read this blog (yet), she won’t hear you. I’m just helping her fight our dreaded collector gene.

Update: check out the comments. Value added – and changed thinking – are reflected there.

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I should have saved them

hot-wheelsEver since we moved Heather’s parents out of their home of nearly 40 years, I have been keenly aware of the need to not keep things.

As I read an article in Car & Driver several months back about middle-aged men collecting and selling their childhood Hot Wheels toy cars, I regretted that I gave away my collection at about age 12. I thought, “Why should I keep these? I don’t play with them anymore!”

Then, I saw what the very first car I bought was going for at a shop not far from where we live – about $80. (The same model was actually pictured in the article – the ugly red Ford Thunderbird. Mine was a sort of gold color.) Oh well.

What thing do you wish you had kept?

(Photos thanks to Car & Driver.)

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Not going to buy it

souvenir-mugHaving access to a digital camera is so freeing. I no longer have to buy things. I can just take a picture, and all it consumes is a few megabytes. Virtually no money is involved. No cubic feet, inches or centimeters need to be occupied in our cabinets. No children need to take trips to the Goodwill (charity shop) after I’m gone. No decisions in the morning of which mug to use.

But I do have a nice reminder of the visual texture a few hundred mugs provide.

Take only pixels, leave only footprints.

(By the way, those of you who know me realize I would not take one of these mugs for myself, even if it was free. And this is not a comment against those of you who like to collect mugs. I do collect physical – and virtual – toothpaste. I have my vices.)

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