Crap, crap and, oh wait, more crap

I gave up some time this past week. With taxes due and my inability to complete them on time (but not for lack of trying, even Mom tried!), I just gave up and called for help. Trying to figure out who to call was hard, though. Mom had just left to go home, so she was out. Megan has two little ones, so, unless I managed to time my crap with their nap, I was out of luck asking for help with Megan. Who else among my circle of friends was unemployed? School isn't out until next month so I didn't have any one to ask for help.

Oh, wait.

Martha!

Whoo!

I gave her a call, and, yes, she was available, yes, she was willing to help me out.

So, she came over today to help me out. And, good lord, did she help me out.

My filing system is one of the most finely tuned filing systems on the planet. It's consistent. It's easy to add papers to it. It's concise and efficient.

It consists of throwing papers into a box and "dealing with it later."

It's also one of the most disastrous filing systems ever. My original plan was to buy a scanner, then, as I received papers, bills and receipts, scan the papers into some, of course, secure system with a recognition system where the bill amounts are extracted and tallied. The papers would then just go into a box, because I had the electronic copy of my papers.

Well, I have the scanner. The rest of it never quite happened.

So, with tax season here and past, extension in hand, I decided I needed to both, organize my 2007 papers, and find the title to the car Kris and I are selling. Sure, I could get another title, but, hey, why not find the one I already have?

Well, for one, it may just involve looking through 10 years of paperwork.

And crap. 10 years of crap.

Martha and i made it through 5 years of crap. I ended up finding recipes I had lost four years ago, including those for sugar bomb cookies (even though I refound the recipe last Christmas at Kris' parents house); documentation for electronics I no longer have; magazines I haven't read in five years BUT STILL HAVE; pictures from our wedding, which were padded by my bathing suit WHICH I LOST THREE YEARS AGO and have been trying to find a replacement ever since; and all sorts of other crap that is going to take me another month to go through.

At one point, I pulled something out of a box, something I couldn't quite recognize. "What do you think this is?" I asked Martha.

"Trash," was her perfect answer.

We processed 10 boxes, reducing them to 4, generating three bags of paper trash (yes, they were recycled), one box of freecycle-rereuse-donate items and one bag of just plain trash.

And an entire box of blogging material. I'll be set for writing material until the end of the year.