Books are my friends

It's supposed to rain all weekend (thanks tropical storm Nicole), so this morning I decided to take a preliminary step towards our eventual move: downsizing our books. It probably comes as no surprise to all of you that we have a lot of books.

Justin & I have lived at our current place for over 4 years. That's the longest I've lived in a single location since I moved out at 18. It's the place we moved into when we got back from our 8 months of travel. Because we downsized before our European trip, we had very little when we moved in. Not expecting to do another international move within 5 years, we have accumulated a TON of stuff, especially books.

I spent my morning sorting books into categories: keep, donate, trade in for credit, throw out. I also have a sub category of "read one more time before you donate, throw out or trade in". I have a (bad? interesting? completely normal) habit of using whatever I have find nearby as a bookmark, and then leaving that bookmark in a book for use when I read it again (I'm a comfort re-reader). As I went through my books, I started removing bookmarks. Oh what an interesting collection of things I found. The pile includes, but is not limited to:

- Many, many receipts, including one from 2011 and one from Zagreb, Crotia (written in Croatian, of course)

- Post-its, with and without things written on them (mostly appointment dates & times)

- One of those bracelets you get when you stay at a resort. It says Carnaval Sun Tour on it. I have no memory of ever going on a Carnaval resort or cruise

- A scrap of paper with chemistry reagents on it. 0.21 mL BCl3, 0.1133g KF, 19.5 DCM. No idea what its for

- Multiple clothing tags, including one with an extra button in the little paper pocket

- two love notes from Justin (glad I found those before I donated the books)

- A copy of my T4 from 2015

- A business card for a guy I used to date in 2008? 2009?

- Canadian Tire money (10 cents)

- A card with a list of words I didn't know from that book (found in a David Foster Wallace book)

- 3 actual bookmarks, including a super cool one from the Franz Kafka museum in Prague that I'm really glad I found

And finally, most impressively (IMHO): An invitation to The Cadet Mess Dinner from when I was in high school, set to take place Jan 19, 2006.

Perhaps I need to work on my hoarder tendencies. I will get to that as soon as I finish with my stack of just-one-more-reread-before-I-can-bear-to-part-with-you books.