I spent a lot of time over the past couple of weeks going through boxes of old papers, books, and pictures with my parents and brother. We moved into the house over 30 years ago when I was less than a year old. Since then, we have accumulated all the usual papers and such that people create, as well as boxes of things from various grandparents and other relatives who have passed away. Twice when I was growing up we went as a family on a sabbatical and rented out our house, once for a full year and once for a semester, but that succeeded only in pushing the boxes further back into the recesses of the attic.
A lot of what we found was junk. Boxes upon boxes of old, outdated tax records gave a reason for my parents to use their new favorite service: document shredding. They called a company that came to the house with a shredder on a truck and the company took all their boxes of old documents and shredded them right there. » Read the rest of this entry «
