It's Like Being An Archeologist But With Piles Of Tosh

There are some tasks that seem too intimidating to approach.

So gargantuan that it's hard to know where to start.

So daunting that every initial step seems steeped in discouragement.

For me that is the family home's rumpus room.

With the family's 'children' now firmly in their 20s it hasn't been a play room for over a decade.

We still use it to watch TV and my brother has his exercise equipment in there but it has acquired a third and less desirable role over the years - the dumping ground.

Anything we didn't want to get rid of but which didn't have a proper home got popped in the cupboard or in what began as a neat pile against the wall and evolved into a tribute to The Great Wall Of China.

Every now and then we mumble something about how we should do something about this.

Then we have a tentative poke around, become disheartened and leave it for 'later'.

Well these holidays 'later' arrived with a vengeance.

It started with a pile of defunct electronics that we'd put aside to 'take to the tip when we get around to it'.

I gathered them up.
I put them in the boot of my car.
I kicked my brother until he came and helped dig around to see if there were any more bits of electronic crap that needed throwing out.
I dragged him to the tip with me.
We dumped the whole pile at the tip's recycling centre so they could strip out the wiring and whatever else they wanted.


We went home drunk on victory!

Well, I was drunk on victory, my brother felt pretty neutral about the whole deal except the kicking and the being press-ganged into participation.

Once I got home, I was on a mission.

Old paperwork was thrust into the hands of the people it belonged to who were forced to go through it and either find a home for it or bin it.

Boxes were opened and emptied and sifted through.
Stuff was reorganised.
Stuff was thrown out.

Floor space was cleared.
Carpet was vacuumed.

More victory inebriation!

It is ridiculous how satisfying this was.

It probably  helped that it had now been so long since certain things had been stored away that we realised that no, we were never going to use them.

It also helped that we've all gotten past the ages where you attach emotional significance to junk.
I'm not saying we're a bunch of robots who threw out our childhood toys, we've kept those, but there were plenty of other things in there which given a few years we can now recognise as things that don't need to be kept.

We still need to go through the big cupboard, which shouldn't be in too bad of a shape as I went through it in 2007 when I was unemployed after coming back from Europe and Young Endeavour.

What I know is lurking in there, waiting for me, is our VHS collection.

Yep.

VHS collection.


The whole thing.

Taped-from-TV and store bought.

Obviously any home movies will be kept and transferred to disc - if they haven't already been - but the rest of it...

It's stupid I know but I feel shitty throwing out the store bought ones seeing as we kept them in such good condition and I feel annoyed throwing out the taped-from-TV ones when they contain things that haven't been released on DVD yet.

I'm going to.

I have to.

It's an obsolete format that we haven't used in years.

I'm going to feel weird about it though.

I hate throwing things out when they still work.

But my strange and pointless attachment to VHS aside, victory!

People are not going to recognise that room when I'm through with it.

And so help them God if they try and pile things up in it again.

Eat It Everyone Who Has Never Won A Nobel Prize! That Includes You Amy!

Take that cynical voices in my head! Take that and swivel on it!

I may have had to basically give up TV for a month - I did not miss much, apparently the new summer programming line up is to include crap and shash.

I may have developed a reflexive twitch that sees me hit Ctrl+S every few seconds even when I am not in a word document - did you know you can save your Spider Solitaire games?

I may now have to make a concentrated effort to use contractions once more as I purged them from my repertoire to make sure that I was making maximum progress with my word count - has anyone noticed how wanky the sentence fragment 'aren't you' looks when expanded to 'are you not' or 'are not you'?

I may now be the proud owner of some of the longest continuous sentences ever written outside of James Joyce's Ulysses - I is can use full stop now!?

I may have ended up eating the laziest meals - can you say microwave cuisine!? - since my Honours year at University! How do you cook again? I remember that fire is hot...

I may now be freaking out because I can not remember what the rest of November entailed apart from squinting and muttering in the light of my computer screen - I assume I went to work because I am still being paid...

But I made it!

I joined the ranks of thousands of people around the world who have managed to churn out at least 50 000 words in one month and I am so high on the feeling that I may in fact be seeing colours that do not exist!

My goal for next year's NaNoWriMo is to learn how to plot because let me tell you, sitting down on the 1st of November and going 'durh what should I write about' and just letting your characters - who are mysteriously close-mouthed about what is going on - drag you from one event to the next makes for an interesting ride but not much in the way of pacing!

I am going to just take a moment to bask in the warm glow of having finished, continue retraining myself how to blink and contact all my friends and family to let them know that the kidnap note and the ransom demand that followed it were actually just a ploy to silence the constant demands for contact and/or attention that they kept making of me.

This fun genre-specific logo is one of many provided to the NaNoWriMo community of Melbourne by the lovely Lauren E Mitchell who knows that we are excitable little pixies who like bright colours