I'm doing a major purge for the first time in a really long time. The most recent purge was when I moved from Canada to California 13 years ago - I packed everything that would fit in my car (a Honda Prelude at the time) and left everything else at my parents' place. Come to think of it, that almost doesn't even count as being a purge.

When I moved from California to Texas, my employer paid for the movers so I just moved everything. Recently I've found boxes of magazines that I hadn't read and never will (they've been recycled now).

This time, with a move to the other side of the world in the works, I am finally discarding much of the stuff that has been slowly filling up my house. I've got the packrat gene from my grandfather (it skipped a generation in my mom) and I tend to keep useless stuff in a box just because I might need something like it someday. Of course, that never happens. I'm making pretty good use of the test, "If you haven't used it in the past year, get rid of it."

This is going fairly well. There is a small list of things that I really love that I want to take with me. Everything else, I can let go. (We are going to make a list of everything that's for sale and post it here, within the next few weeks.)

Finally, while emptying a box in my closet, I discovered my original diploma from the University of Victoria (may 1992), that I had lost and had convinced myself that it had been accidentally discarded. I thought I had torn the place up looking for that, but it was buried deep in a box. Yay!