People with houses tend to have a room or area in the basement. For people in apartments, it can be as small as a drawer or as large as a storage locker.
It's the junk pile, the place where things with no place or immediate need wind up. In my apartment, it's between the bed and the bedroom window.
The photo above shows what sorts of things I've been tossing from there:
- paper and periodicals
- things I thought I would use but never did, like shopping bags
- clothes I don't want anymore (this one is hard, because some of the clothes I made — it's hard to toss that time and effort)
- charity items, like the hat I made that's visible on the right-hand side of the photo
And yes books, always more books. Some of them will be heading to the book exchange shelves in the recycling room, but some of them will find proper homes on the newly-thinned shelves.
I was very pleased to rediscover my copy of Radio Free Albemuth again, as well as the Dutch-language Tintin books you can see beneath it. That's The Mysteries of Harris Burdick directly below — a great book for writing prompts!
I'm blogging Day 4 and 5 together because they're both devoted to clearing out The Stuff Behind the Bed. It's halfway through the reverse shopping frenzy to Yule. It'll be interesting to see if I every run out of paper to get rid of.