Christmas, SF style year 2

[dr4b]

Not much to say about the day of, actually.  I stayed up super-late until like 5am skyping with dvarin which was great although a little bit surreal, since for years it was him calling me when I lived in Japan, now it's the reverse.

I spent the afternoon throwing out a garbage bag full of my stuff.  I dunno, it just seemed like a good goal for the afternoon.  Mostly it ended up being papers and things but I also went through and threw out some actual Stuff, and some t-shirts.  What sucks is all of my Japanese baseball stuff that really isn't useful to me anymore but it feels like a rare weird memory thing and so it's hard for me to get rid of some of this stuff.  Meh.

In the evening I went to Jason's house for dinner.  He made prime rib.  It was fantastic.  Yaakov and Damon and I all took the BART there and back in the rain.  Good times.

Two days until my east coast trip.  Totally not prepared...

Comments

[zqfmbg.livejournal.com]

Throwing out stuff is surprisingly hard, and a stark reminder to me of how much stuff I get (and how much money I spend on it) and how little I use it. Some things are certainly there for collectible value (I'll decline to state here, but feel free to ask) but for the most part, most of it is not worth the money and effort and space consumed. And yet there's always the "but I might find a use for it someday" thing.

Parting with entire boxes full of old computer junk was really hard, but in the end, the question that did it was: how likely am I to use this junk in the coming years, given how much of it I have used up until now? That said, I don't have sentimental attachments to computer stuff. So if it's not being used, it's not worth keeping.

[dr4b]

Do you know anywhere around here to recycle old computer stuff, actually? I should look into that.

[zqfmbg.livejournal.com]

Not really. I know there are quite a few places around, and some that claim they'll come by and grab your junk for free, though I always feel like those should have strings attached. There are e-waste dropoffs from time to time at schools and community centers. Before I started at Google, I left some stuff with small nonprofits that seemed rather fly-by-night; one that I went to had rented a small garage someplace and it was crammed full with lots of stuff. I don't know if that's typical, but I'd expect it.

More troubling is the thought that some of these might just be loading large containers full of the stuff and shipping it to places like rural China for manual and extremely hazardous "reclamation". But I don't really know how to tell who does that.

Google has collection sites for e-waste so I just bring my junk in now and leave it. Oddly enough, there are scavengers who go through it -- I noticed quite a few of the things I brought in had mysteriously disappeared within 24 hours, as I brought in loads on an almost daily basis. A lot of it was in the "not worth my while to try to sell" category, so I can't say I minded.

And on that note, if your stuff is still working and you care, you might see if a local used junk store (weirdstuff.com, etc) might want to buy it.