Barbara J. Hamby

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Labor Day Weekend

There are very few days in my present life that I can truthfully call hard working. But, after two relaxing days (Saturday and Sunday), yesterday was an actual day of labor for me. Saturday I loafed, read and watched TV. Sunday a cousin and his wife came over for a visit and we all had dinner together--a very pleasant afternoon. On Labor Day, my son-in-law came over to help me move furniture around: that is to say, I directed; he moved. Because of the speed with which he moved, I was pretty exhausted when we finished.

In the early evening I fell asleep watching television, but managed to get a few things put away in their new locations after I woke up. Having moved a desk, a bookcase and a file cabinet into a different room, I had packed their contents into boxes. Today I spent most of the day emptying those boxes and arranging the clutter in and on the bookcase and desk. At this moment, I know where everything is. Tomorrow, who knows?

I already have some floppy disks and CD’s to recycle and will have many more after I get a chance to look at what’s on the remaining ones. I even have some zip files that need to be deleted or put on CD’s. The technology has definitely gotten ahead of me over the last few years. I still have some of the truly floppy disks that are larger than CD’s to be recycled also. I have no hardware that will read those anymore.

I searched the web to learn there are companies that allegedly will remove the contents of disks and CD’s and recycle them. Some will even shred hard drives if you pay the postage to send them to the recyclers. The problem I have is trusting that they will all actually be erased and not posted on You Tube or one of the other popular depositories of miscellaneous and extraneous material. Almost anything is preferable to filling garbage dumps with all that obsolete technology.

So now we have a bedroom that looks like a bedroom and a spare room that looks typically crowded and cluttered with the detritus of a sometime writer. There is still actually space for a queen bed, along with all the computer equipment and other office accouterments. And tonight I’m only pleasantly tired, not totally exhausted.