Too much stuff...

There's a down side to trying to clean up a small mountain of paper and what-have-you that's been accumulating for several decades, and that's having to deal with it.

I started the day in a marvelously cold-blooded manner. You see, one of the primary hurdles in handling "stuff" is determining whether you need it to begin with. The packrat in me can always rationalize a likely future scenario in which some scrap of paper will become important. However, if you approach life with that glint in your eye, you soon end up a slave to your "stuff."

Then again, there is a big difference between the "intellectual" knowledge that too much "stuff" is bad, and the visceral knowledge that you don't want to get rid of any of it. I've done a reasonable job for today, though.

The basis for all of this is a mid-to-high need to find Natalie's expired passport, or barring that, her birth certificate. I could have sworn that these items had been transmitted to said daughter some time ago - during a trip to Houston, methinks - because they are not where they had been for the longest time. However, there is no harm in checking, and it helps me get rid of more junk.

* * *In the end, I decided not to respond to the agency that - basically - asked me to dream up a chapter-level book proposal over the weekend (with justifications, no less!) based on a one-sentence description of the material available for translation. Primarily, I became aware of other, highly qualified companies that have been chasing this job for several weeks, which made me seriously think that a weekend's work composing some kind of chimeral book proposal out of several types of whole cloth and smoke was not the best use of my time.

The good news, though, is that my initial gut response (in terms of a likely person to team with) was right on the money, and that LinkedIn and Google allowed me to find him within five minutes.

Cheers...