I'd love a fold-up shopping cart. My elderly mother has trouble getting around but won't use a walker, so what she does is grab a shopping cart *every* time we go somewhere and uses it for balance. She also always has a heavy handbag and totebag and occasionally her oxygen generator or her inhaler thing (nebulizer) and other stuff, so I end up schlepping a lot around. If the fold-up cart would hold that kind of thing (and maybe even a yappy Pomeranian? *GRIN*), it would be a godsend. Where did you buy yours? (I'm assuming you're not in Dallas, so there's no "run by to pick it up" option.) I always see them in catalogs, but they're expensive and you don't know if they'd be sturdy or not from the photos.
Oh . . . and . . . I never have that much trouble getting rid of clothes and so forth, except I wince at the money I spent on the stuff ("This cost $40, forcryinoutloud!") We're always "junking" (and giving to my brother-in-law) the computer stuff and office equipment that we accumulate, because hubby has a way of upgrading. I do have a lot of knick-knacky stuff that I keep in a big china cabinet-type piece. Occasionally I will go through it, but since we never have garage sales and I usually can't find anyone to take the stuff, I end up putting it back on the bottom shelf ("in rotation"). The last time I tried to give some porcelain and some dishes to a charity, the charity pickup people just slung the box into the back of the truck, and I'm sure it was all smashed. Sometimes, the reason people don't have anything is that they don't take care of stuff, I guess . . . so they're always just wasteful, rather than packratty. I think maybe we packrats are a bit more sensible, though we do need to divest occasionally. And we get a terrible media rap.
What I hang on to is my library. I keep the books that touched me, that meant something to me. Not best-sellers, for the most part (I don't think I have any best-sellers other than the Bible and Shakespeare in the house . . . maybe a few of our cookbooks?), but books that are midlist, that are special, books I read in childhood or teenhood (and had to get new copies of, because The Sneaky Mother used to get hold of every book I had and get rid of it whenever I wasn't looking, because her philosophy is "why re-read, ever??" I knew she was doing it, and it caused issues of trust. (Which I still have. My "trust" and faith in human nature was further eroded by some abuse later in childhood, although not from her. Still, it'd be nice to be able to trust that when you got back to your room, all your writing and notebooks would still be there, rather than hoping to find a good hiding place so the "trash you keep scribbling" would not always be gone when you came back to it. Although it was undoubtedly juvenilia, it was my intellectual property, and it had meaning to *me*. I know that y'all are not throwing out your kids' diaries and schoolwork, though.) I read fast and started reading young, so I had to teach myself to forget what I'd read quickly, or else I'd run out of reading material too fast. We only got new books every couple of weeks or so. Hubby laughs, because he remembers the plot and so forth of EVERY book, and he WILL NOT re-read a novel. I enjoy rereading novels after a period of time, and I always find something new when I come back to the good ones. (This may sound strange, but then I am strange.)
Public libraries no longer keep copies of any works that have not been checked out in the past year or so. (Check the policy at your library.) They buy 90 copies of the flavor-of-the-month and have a library sale where you find Jane Austen. They're not getting shiny new copies of worn-out tomes, either. They're just getting rid of stuff the "patrons are not interested in" and putting in DVDs. I will merely note that if there is to be a "library" of books that I feel are worthy and that I would like to see survive to the next generation, or even have them so that I can refer to them or re-read them, I'd better keep them and then eventually donate the collection to someone who loves books. As long as I'm on this side of the veil, I'm going to keep copies of the books I love.
Bless your heart. . . .
Oh . . . and . . . I never have that much trouble getting rid of clothes and so forth, except I wince at the money I spent on the stuff ("This cost $40, forcryinoutloud!") We're always "junking" (and giving to my brother-in-law) the computer stuff and office equipment that we accumulate, because hubby has a way of upgrading. I do have a lot of knick-knacky stuff that I keep in a big china cabinet-type piece. Occasionally I will go through it, but since we never have garage sales and I usually can't find anyone to take the stuff, I end up putting it back on the bottom shelf ("in rotation"). The last time I tried to give some porcelain and some dishes to a charity, the charity pickup people just slung the box into the back of the truck, and I'm sure it was all smashed. Sometimes, the reason people don't have anything is that they don't take care of stuff, I guess . . . so they're always just wasteful, rather than packratty. I think maybe we packrats are a bit more sensible, though we do need to divest occasionally. And we get a terrible media rap.
What I hang on to is my library. I keep the books that touched me, that meant something to me. Not best-sellers, for the most part (I don't think I have any best-sellers other than the Bible and Shakespeare in the house . . . maybe a few of our cookbooks?), but books that are midlist, that are special, books I read in childhood or teenhood (and had to get new copies of, because The Sneaky Mother used to get hold of every book I had and get rid of it whenever I wasn't looking, because her philosophy is "why re-read, ever??" I knew she was doing it, and it caused issues of trust. (Which I still have. My "trust" and faith in human nature was further eroded by some abuse later in childhood, although not from her. Still, it'd be nice to be able to trust that when you got back to your room, all your writing and notebooks would still be there, rather than hoping to find a good hiding place so the "trash you keep scribbling" would not always be gone when you came back to it. Although it was undoubtedly juvenilia, it was my intellectual property, and it had meaning to *me*. I know that y'all are not throwing out your kids' diaries and schoolwork, though.) I read fast and started reading young, so I had to teach myself to forget what I'd read quickly, or else I'd run out of reading material too fast. We only got new books every couple of weeks or so. Hubby laughs, because he remembers the plot and so forth of EVERY book, and he WILL NOT re-read a novel. I enjoy rereading novels after a period of time, and I always find something new when I come back to the good ones. (This may sound strange, but then I am strange.)
Public libraries no longer keep copies of any works that have not been checked out in the past year or so. (Check the policy at your library.) They buy 90 copies of the flavor-of-the-month and have a library sale where you find Jane Austen. They're not getting shiny new copies of worn-out tomes, either. They're just getting rid of stuff the "patrons are not interested in" and putting in DVDs. I will merely note that if there is to be a "library" of books that I feel are worthy and that I would like to see survive to the next generation, or even have them so that I can refer to them or re-read them, I'd better keep them and then eventually donate the collection to someone who loves books. As long as I'm on this side of the veil, I'm going to keep copies of the books I love.