My goal for January is to declutter my tiny apartment. It's amazing how someone who doesn't actually own many possessions (it's a furnished apartment so almost all of the stuff is not mine) can still have too much junk. A small amount of miscellaneous stuff arrived from my mom's place and it has no place to go. Sad detritus of her life: broken glasses, broken jewelry, old membership cards, old cellphones. Some of it just had to go into the trash, and it made me so sad. Now I have two plastic bins to get rid of, too. That goes out on the street after it rains.
I have two drawers that have nothing but old electronic gear, so I'm sorting through it to see what I should keep and what should go to an electronic recycling center, along with mom's old phones. I have: two car device chargers for the car I no longer own; a travel router for the wifi the building no longer has; four old samsung phones and one old iphone (at least three of them are my mom's phones) that I need to factory reset before I recycle them; charger cables that I'm trying to pair up with the appropriate device; an old ipod that I haven't used for years that still has a lot of great music and playlists I used when I walked around the lake or by the Mississippi river when I still lived in Minneapolis; a set of expensive Sony headphones with a broken connection that means I can only hear through one side unless I wiggle the jack; something that looks like an old clock (but I don't even know since it was mom's) that needs new batteries; a very fancy cell phone tripod, bluetooth lens shutter, and macro lens for a phone that I won as door prizes and have never used. I have a Kindle my mother persuaded me to buy that I have never really used and which I probably won't use because I have about two hundred real books cluttering up my place that I need to read before I buy any more. And my niece and nephew gave me a $50 gift card to Moe's!
I should try to sell or give away that photo gear--someone could appreciate it! One of the things I got from mom that I will keep is a little portable battery charger for recharging my phone on the road. It has a smaller capacity than the one I took to Japan --in my backpack ready for my next trip-- and it's more portable.
I have now done the factory reset on all the phones. I actually remembered the screen lock pattern from my old Samsung so I was able to wipe it. It still had a lovely screensaver photo of peach blossoms that I may no longer be able to find, but that's OK. I will deal with my photo archive mess later this week. I can walk this small stuff over to the electronics recycling center in west Berkeley, a little past the 4th street zone. It will be a good walk on a day when it is not raining, and that is looking like Tuesday. I still have an old unusable desktop that my mom gave me when I moved her five years ago that is just taking up room. That needs a ride from my sister or brother-in-law. I should try to reformat the hard drive too.
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