Cluttered Memory Lane Meets Technology
I have a split
personality: I’m am an organized, sentimental packrat. I’m also analytical and have found an answer
to my constant torment.
I’d accumulated
knickknacks, clothing, books, toys, furniture, pictures, even dishes and
kitchen gadgets not because I particularly liked the looks of them or that they
were useful, but because they drew up precious memories from my past. Like the
colander my mom used to strain pasta for Sunday dinners. Dishes I got from the gang at work when I got
married. Trolls I’d been collecting
since childhood. The Boston rocker I
sang my babies to sleep in. Sweaters my
grandmother had crocheted for me. When
you start having to cram five decades of junk into a single room you rent from
friends, it’s time to thin the herd.
What memories did
I choose to part with? None of
them. Follow me down memory lane and
I’ll explain.
I started with my
camera. Having pictures of every single
item that triggered a memory, allowed me to either pass the belongings on to my
grown children, or donate them to Goodwill.
Believe me, it’s a lot easier to store pictures than furniture and sets of
china.
I prefer to
display my memories, not store them away in a box, so I organized a few unique
and irreplaceable items that I want to pass down to my kids and grandchildren
onto a single knickknack shelf. In
addition to the memory shelf, I chose about a dozen and a half pictures to
frame and hang about my room.
Then I bought an
inexpensive little scanner and an equally inexpensive external 1 terabite hard
drive (on sale for well under $100) and went to town with them. I started off with six large totes of
financial, personal, writing, and memoir files.
Every last scrap of that information is stored on my computer and
external hard drive. Believe me, when I
have to look up banking information, a warranty for an item, or the character
list for a novel I wrote in 1983, it’s much easier to plug in the hard drive
and scroll through my files than drag out heavy file totes and paw through
folder after folder of paper. When
everything was scanned in, saved and backed up, I shredded hardcopies and unloaded
them into the recyclable bin! What a
liberating feeling! Whew!
Three large
Rubbermaid storage totes of family photos (including all the photos of the
belongings I’d taken) came next. As I
scanned them in, I saw pictures I hadn’t looked at in years because they had
been so hard to get at. Now they are all
part of my slideshow screensaver. They
are not only backed up on my external hard drive, but I uploaded them onto my
Facebook page and have shared them with distant family members who love them as
well. A digital frame was a lovely
birthday gift for my mom. Every time I
take pictures of my grandchildren I send her a flash drive full of their happy
little faces.
Suddenly shelf
space opened up, and tripping over storage totes piled everywhere became a
thing of the past. Overwhelming
clutter? Vanished!
Now I’m on a new
mission. As a writer I have hundreds of
reference books in my room. Being
partially disabled, it’s difficult for me to constantly retrieve books from the
shelf, prop them up around my computer and keep them open to specific pages
while taking notes.
My solution: Scan
in the books. I started with the books I
use on a regular basis, but now I’ve graduated to everything except books that
are actually too wide for the scanning bed.
I scan while I watch movies or TV or listen to music. Once the book is in my computer, I save it to
my external hard drive, then donate the book to my local library.
If I’m
researching, all I have to do is plug my external hard drive into my laptop,
and voila! Info at my fingertips! Toggling between screens trumps managing
cumbersome books every time. True, it’s
time consuming to scan in books, but I can now fit my 100-plus book library in
my purse.
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