Rothenburger — The challenges of downsizing from Annu to Rembrandt

COLUMN — I have a lot of cardboard boxes full of stuff. I’ve been inspired, of late, to thin some of them out.

Actually, it’s not a matter of inspiration so much as necessity. My father-in-law decided it was time to move from his house, which required reducing his inventory to fit his “new digs,” as he calls his new apartment.

His strategy included giving tons of stuff to charities or bestowing it on family. Some of it came our way. In order to accommodate it, we need to make room. It’s like one of those Tim Horton’s paying-it-forward things where everybody buys coffee for the person behind them.

So far, the results are mixed. I tend to lose my focus. “You haven’t thrown out a thing,” Syd said last night when I bragged about all the work I was putting into the project.

There is, for example, a pocket-sized auto-expenses booklet, the kind made out of paper, from 2003. It tells me that on Aug. 30 that year, I paid 89.1 cents per litre for regular gas. Outrageous price.

Fortunately, a month later it went down to 67.4 cents.

This is an important historic document. You never know when you might need to know the price of gas in 2003.

In another box, I found a juicer. Not one of those new electric, plastic ones where you shove in an orange and flick a switch. This is pewter, shaped like a huge tadpole. You raise the lever, put in the orange and crank down as hard as you can, then pour whatever you get into a glass. No doubt all kinds of toxic contaminants leach into the juice from the metal like a mini Mount Polley.

I remember this contraption from when I was a kid. It came into my possession when my mom passed away and it’s a keeper. It’s back in the box.

A newspaper clipping, only slightly yellowed, is dated Feb. 14, 1992 and the headline announces, “Daily News signs $1.3-million deal to buy Bay building.”

“It’s official,” the story says. “The Kamloops Daily News has a new home in the former Bay Building at Seymour Street and Fourth Avenue and will move in by May 24.”

A newspaper clipping takes up hardly any space, so why throw it away even if it reminds you that your former employer is out of business and your old office is going to become a parking lot?

Every couple of years I come across the briefcase I used in high school. I told Syd the other day it had to go; it’s still in the basement. Ditto for the box of curling trophies, even though I don’t know when I won them because most of the plaques have fallen off.

They say you should take pictures of things that remind you of days gone by and take the things to the dumpster. Why take a picture of bank statements from the ‘60s when the picture would take up as much space as the real thing?

It’s not as though I’m one of those hoarders you see on TV where you have to step over piles of plush toys, empty fast-food containers and dead cats to get through the front door. My stuff is relatively organized — anything that hasn’t been sorted is in boxes labeled “Miscellaneous.”

I confess, however, that I tend to keep too many documents; I’m seriously working on kicking the habit. I’ve moved a pile of those bank statements right next to the shredder, along with my school board minutes from 1974. A couple of years ago I proudly wrote about purging several old phone books. Baby steps.

They say if you haven’t used something for a year, you should get rid of it. I unearthed a couple of big boxes full of the 1968 edition of The American People’s Encyclopedia a door-to-door salesman sold me shortly after I got my first full-time job. It’s too good to throw away, so I’ve started reading it. I’m on page 11 of Volume 2, Annu to Bayonee Decree, having accidently skipped Volume 1.

I’ve learned about Ludwig Anzengruber, apocalyptic literature, and apomorphine hydrochloride.

All of which leaves the stuff my father-in-law gave me sitting in the hallway. Tools, mostly, wrenches and screwdrivers, extension cords and handsaws. You can never have too many of those.

He also gave us a really neat old rain gauge, a big copper tube with progressively smaller containers inside one another, like one of those wooden Russian dolls. It was used at a B.C. Hydro station he worked at.

I should have tried it out Thursday night during the thunderstorm, except I have no idea how it works. When I get to Volume 15, Photo-Engraving to Rembrandt, I hope to find an entry for “Rain gauge.”

AROUND THE TOWN — Carla Stewart has a new job. She was a City planner in Kamloops before moving on to Brampton a few years ago and then City Hall in Surrey. As of this month she’s a planning instructor at Langara College….. RIH isn’t the only hospital with parking problems. The parkade at Kelowna General is closed for maintenance until next week…. Condolences to a former Kamloops Daily News colleague and his family. Michael Bourget, the stepson of former KDN pressman Keith Gordey (who now works for Kodiak Press at the Coast) and his wife Carolyn, was killed in that motorcycle-pickup truck accident on West Victoria last Sunday.