As I've already mentioned before, much of our time the past few weekends has been involved in cleaning out the basement and the garage, mostly in preparation for the inevitable move that's coming in the next 2.5 monts or so.  Doing so has, of course, required the sorting of our stuff into three piles: the keep pile, the yard sale (and Goodwill if it doesn't sell) pile, and the trash pile.  Fortunately, the keep pile has stayed the smallest, thus far.  That's kinda the point.

See, we both come from families of pack rats.  We both convince ourselves of material sentimentality that may or may not exist.  Most of the crap in our basement and garage, we'd completely forgotten about, yet some of it, the stuff in the keep pile, we still apparently like enough to hold on to.  We also both convince ourselves that things may somehow be useful in the future to us, even though we both know we'll completely forget we had said object if that bizarre need ever actually arises. 

We've been conquering this, though, one box at a time.  As we've done this, I've gotten a little disturbed by a few things:

1. We've been storing and toting around way too much shit.  I mean, seriously.  We're a young married couple.  We've not been around to collect this much stuff.  And yet, we have, and we're reluctant to throw it away. Thankfully, we've been getting past that the past couple weekends
2. A related note: we have so much shit right now that we're going to have a really large rummage sale.  People are seriously going to be wondering if we're closing out some old person's estate or something.
3. We have been keeping way too much shit that isn't worthy of even a crappy rummage sale.  The best evidence of this is the current state of our front yard.  I actually counted today because I was curious, and we have 17 giant barrel-sized trashbags out there (plus other big stuff), awaiting pickup. 
   
4. The fact that our trash "leaves" before the pickup comes.  Okay, that deserves its own paragraph.
   

I'm really a little disturbed by our neighborhood, because a number of big things we put out front to send away -- you know, stuff that's too trashy for our home (remembering that we're poor students who currently together live on one grad student stipend), and that we've deemed too trashy for a yard sale -- has gotten up and walked away.  It's not the bags or anything, and those are left untouched.  It's the big junk.   An old broken propane grill our parents brought us for parts to fix our other one (which also no longer exists)?  Gone within an hour.  The old really broken dryer we had with a fried computer, that I had taken apart and left in pieces, was gone within five minutes.  Not too long after we moved here, we had put out an atrocious entertainment center.  Solid, but really ugly.  By the time I had walked back into the house, it was marching across our yard into our neighbor's house.

One man's trash...