Digging into the past
04 March 2022With my new dining table due to arrive next week after being on order for the best part of five months I needed to do some rearranging of my apartment, and since this involved unloading and moving some shelving I felt it was time to have another round of sorting out. In the process I finally found what was the only unaccounted-for sentimental item on my “missing” list. Additionally I feel that at least the accomodation side of my life is geting very close to finally being sorted. I have already written everything there is to say about the last 24 months and it comes down to a certain brand of crates and getting them all moved over to the UK, but I will say this is one small bit of closure that is more than welcome.
The baskets
I used to keep several plastic baskets on and around my desk that were intended for small loose items as I found this preferable to ever-larger disorganised piles. One of these was for medicines and plasters but the others had a cross-section of receipts, business cards, electronics devices, conference lanyards, and even an item or two that are not appropriate to mention publicly. During my move back to the UK I stacked them together then cellophane-wrapped them and although I had long-since unwrapped them I never had more than a cursory rummage through them.
The plan was to decamp the items in the baskets into boxes better suited for storage and in the process have a proper look through to see what is in them. I knew there would be an old laptop hard drive from when I upgraded my laptop to a solid-state drive and switched from Ubuntu to Slackware, but I had clean forgot about the unused copy of Windows 7 I bought the day after having to suffer Windows 8.1 for the first time and the Air New Zealand gold flyer baggage tag that I am not even sure when I stopped using.
However the one item I was really happy to find was a pin badge for the Soohorang winter olympics that was custom-made for one of its sponsors, and that is due to the story behind it. I had long-suspected this is where it was located but being a relatively small and flat item I am hardly surprised it was missed, as it would only be found it with an empty-everything-out tipping up of the whole basket followed by a close-attention sorting. With other things to sort out this was something that until this point I felt was best left undisturbed.
Why the sentiment?
I dislike commenting publicly about personal relationships but Soohorang is in Korea and the person in my life at the time was Korean — and by request I managed to get hold of a second one for them. For some reason it is the little things that others would have long-forgotten about that I tend to remember. This was far from the most sentimental item left behind from the relationship as I have other things from my trip to Korea that I consider far more important, but all these others are ones I never had any real worries about where they were.
Maybe I ought to just forget about them all but with so much of my life in a mess it is only recently I got round to getting over the breakup. Of the half-dozen items on my “missing” list the pin badge was the last that I was actively looking for and although finding it was not exactly a high priority it did wonders for my confidence that nothing irreplacable is ‘lost’ — this is a relief of having to hold my nerve on this through the dark days of lockdown.
Where items live
While items were in storage I could use a mental image of where I used to keep them to work out which items they tended to be near, and in turn such items were usually kept in the same crates. However over the last few months this association broke down as things were unpacked but had yet to find their ‘home’ and this led to quite a few panic searches for items that had yet to establish which place they are best left in. Now that furniture and shelving are now pretty much sorted things are settling down in this respect although it is far from complete, particularly as at some point in the future I will have to do a proper stock-take and sort-through of all my electronic component stocks — I have lost track of how much of my previous stock-take actually made it into my stock database and I am better off trying to get it into a more systematic if not space-efficient order.
Being all part of building a new life I actually wanted to break some of the storage assocations I had developed and replace them with something much more logical — I did this to some extent last year with my electronic component stocks and have recently been applying the same ideas to my computer equipment. With such a clean sheet I may as well extend this to everything within my apartment.