Why is it so hard to say goodbye...

... to an old cardboard box!?!? I just unpacked the last box that solely held my stuff - it was my last box. I've had this box since 1999. Nine years!!

Today, I bid it farewell. I'm surprising sad about it... not the contents in the box, but saying good bye to the box itself. This box has been with me since the beginning of my post-college days and now we part. It goes to the recycling bin to be morphed into something else. For a box that has been shuffled through four states, it's still very sturdy. I guess that's why some people make furniture out of the FedEx boxes. They hold up very well!

The items that were in the box, so many random things. Random decorations that we hung in our dorm room during my FRESHMAN days! Items that I somehow deemed too valuable to throw away... I'm not sure why a free poster from a free movie preview of a movie that I only mildly liked is something that I needed to move from Austin to NY to Denver to Dallas to Austin to NY.

I've always known that I tend to be a pack-rat. I don't know if it's the sentimental values or it's just pure laziness. Living in Colorado and Texas, my apartment was always large enough that I can just have random boxes pile up somewhere. The lack of square footage in our current home has forced me to evaluate my pack-rat tendencies. Some of it is easy; some of it is really hard. I've had to really think about why I want to keep things since everything I keep, I've had to find a home for it. I think I'm getting the hang of it. I keep postcards; I throw away stubs from our vacations - I mean, honestly, I'm not going to make that scrapbook of that last vacation. I have the pictures and that just needs to be enough.