a new kind of pack-rat

I am working from home today and am having trouble concentrating. Most of my work requires me to think in French, which most days is tres facile, but other days I just cannot get into the zone. Today is one of those days! So I thought I would take a break and do something I have been meaning to do for a long time...

I am not a pack-rat really. I have moved around enough that I have learned the value of having fewer things to pack up. The annual garage sales my parents would have in our front yard when I was a kid also helped train me to keep only what I actually use. I have one box in my parents house of things I am keeping for sentimental reasons from my childhood and I can't remember the last time I got rid of a book (why would anyone get rid of books?!) but aside from these things, I am pretty good at purging and keeping my worldly belongings to a minimum.

Except in one area. My email inbox. I have a hard time deleteing emails. I'm not sure where this comes from but maybe I think that I will want to read them again, or that for one reason or another they will someday be useful. So I have become a new kind of pack-rat. Now according to hotmail I have only used about 1% of the available storage space, but having reached 28 pages in my inbox I began to suspect that maybe it was time to go through some of these...

Wow. I had emails dating back to before I lived in South Africa! Some of these emails were easy to delete - notifications that someone had commented on my blog, emails about events that are now long over, updates from traveling friends about their adventures, emails from old camp friends. Other emails were surprisingly more difficult. Emails from my French exchange partner, the email that told me my cat Buddy had died while I was in SA, emails with news of new babies and upcoming weddings. Going through these emails reminded me of people I haven't emailed in a long time and gave me a chance to respond to some of them. There were even a couple of emails from people who I have forgotten how I know them....

Now, after much successful procrastinating I have widdled the inbox down to only 2 and a half pages. I need to transfer contact information to my address book and write out a couple of recipes and then I will get it down to one page. Now I just have to remember to delete emails as they come in so I never have to deal with this again! Although, it was a very useful means of procrastination...