That’s my collection of magnets on the fridge. Over the past 3 or 4 years, I’ve been trying to pick one up from every city/state/place that I end up visiting. They’re a good thing to collect since they take up so little space and I’ll always have a place to put them since I’ll always have a fridge. Or a stove. Or a metal door. I also like that most of them are durable, they don’t get scratched up or dusty since they’re all stuck on the fridge, and they’re prominently displayed where people can see them rather than being put away in a box or a drawer. Magnets are the only thing I collect anymore.

I used to collect lots of crap. I had a gigantic phone collection, a basement full of outdated computer systems and accessories, dozens of boxes filled with miscellaneous plugs and wires, a sizable DVD collection, probably 1,000 books (95% that were probably only read once or less), business cards, hundreds of t-shirts. I collected all kinds of phone company related items such as pay phone inserts, calling cards, advertisements, plates and postcards.

I had most of an entire room of our basement filled with kids clothing that my kids either outgrew or hadn’t grown into yet. I didn’t want to throw any of it out, because I might know someone that needed that size of kids clothing someday. And of course I had to collect dressers, shelves, totes, and racks to keep all this stuff on.

Each year, I worked at building up my Christmas and Halloween decorations. In the days after each holiday was over, I would snag even more decorations to add to the giant totes that stored our various holiday things. I also saved every little scrap of wood from my home renovations and other projects. I built wooden racks to store all the spare wood on. I had piles of alarm clocks, piles of smoke detectors and piles of circuit boards.

At some point during the past 4 or 5 years, I realized how pointless it was to collect so much stuff. All it did was take up space, deteriorate and cost money to maintain. There was really no reason to keep any of it. My constant acquiring of stuff was turning me into a compulsive hoarder. I bet that’s how those people start out, just collecting things that seem useful at the time. Soon after my realization, I was lucky enough to get a huge kickstart in ridding my life of all those possessions.

In 2005, I moved from Illinois to Oregon. And thankfully, I deemed it way too expensive to move my giant house full of useless stuff to Oregon with me. I didn’t intend to get rid of all my stuff right away, though. At first, I decided I would just sell all the furniture, put my stuff in storage, cram what I really needed into the car and drive to Oregon. And that’s what I did. I made more than enough money to move myself to Oregon by selling 3 floors of furniture. And I just barely managed to shove everything else into a 10 x 12 storage unit.

I planned to try and move it all to Oregon. And while I still missed some of my old stuff once I moved to Oregon, it kind of made me realize how much I didn’t really need it and I began to despise the $50/month bill that I was paying to store 960 cubic feet of things I didn’t really even need. When I visited Illinois the following Christmas, I got rid of half of the things in storage. I either sold it, donated it to Salvation Army, or threw it away. It was painful to throw away so much good stuff, but it felt great. The following summer, I got to do it all again. It took about 20 months and over $1,000 in storage fees, but it was finally all gone. Sure, I still kept some of it. Mostly just sentimental and/or useful things, though.

That’s how I managed to rid myself of probably 95% of my possessions. And I’ve done pretty good at not letting it pile up again either. I’ve actually sold every single one of my DVDs during the past year. And I’ve been buying books cheap on Amazon, reading them, and then immediately selling them back. Sometimes even at a profit! I even use the library. It makes so much more sense than owning thousands of books I’ll never read again. I’m a regular donater at Goodwill and a regular seller on Craigslist. I throw out all of my kids clothes that are too small instead of waiting years to meet someone who has a kid that might need them. My own collection of shirts is at a reasonable level. I even get rid of electronics that I don’t think I’ll ever use again and I only own phones that I actually hook up to phone lines regularly.

Last year, I talked to this old man at a flea market who had a table full of baseball memorabilia. Everything you could imagine related to baseball was on this huge table. I asked him how he ended up with so much of it and he said he’d been collecting it since he was a boy. It was just something he obsessively collected for 30+ years, for no reason really. He told me he didn’t even need the money, but he didn’t know what else to do with it all and wanted to get it out of his house because it was just taking up space. So he rents a table every few weeks at the flea market, trying to get rid of it all. That’s your future, collectors of stuff.

So ask yourself…do you really need several closets and dressers full of clothing? Is your collection of stolen ashtrays really worth the space that they take up? Wouldn’t you love to make hundreds of dollars by selling your DVD collection? I ended up getting over $500 for all of mine. All those movies and TV shows are on cable all the time anyway, aren’t they? On-demand programming is growing quick on both the internet and cable TV, so all those DVDs (and even Blu-ray discs) are going to be obsolete in just a few short years. Better sell them while they’re still worth something.

How about making a few more hundred dollars by selling all of your books? I bet half of what you own is available at the library anyway, as well as tons of what you don’t own. Make a small fortune by selling them! Does your room full of Star Wars action figures and toys really mean that much to you? Do you really think it’s going to go up in value? Will that value even be worth the effort of storing it all for 50 years? How about those cute little figurines that you keep in a glass case. What are they good for? Are you seriously keeping those hundreds of magazines for reference? How many times have you actually referred to them?

In closing, watch this short video:George Carlin - Stuff. And I expect the comments area of this post to quickly fill with people telling me how I’ve made them decide to free their lives of clutter.

It’s been a fun week. The kids and I drove to Idaho for most of the week, Spokane for most of a day, and then Seattle for two days. Today we did touristy Seattle stuff. Visited the Space Needle, the science fiction museum, and a bunch of shops along the pier. I’ve seen RijilV every day I’ve been here and will see him tomorrow too. I haven’t seen him since he left Alton 4 years ago.

We brought our cat with us for all of this. He did great in the car and with the other animals. The kids have probably spent a total of about 5 or 6 hours in the hotel pool since we’ve been here. And we’ll probably hang out there for another 3 tomorrow before we start driving back to Oregon. It’s been a fun trip and I’m glad I finally got to take the kids to Seattle like I’ve been meaning to do for the past 2 years that I’ve lived in the Northwest. Next on the list…San Francisco.

Here’s a few pictures of this week.

Today I tricked some people into taking their toasters apart. I never thought I would open up a journal entry with that sentence, but it’s true. Ever since we made the video in 2003 that showed us hijacking fast food drive-thru frequencies, people have been asking us how we did it. So after 4 years of being asked, I finally made a video that explains how we did it. The only thing is, I lied. The video tells people they need to take apart their toaster and pull out a crystal from the circuit board. And toasters don’t have crystals in them.

I submitted the video to a few blogs that I subscribe to and two of the picked it up - Gizmodo and Consumerist. These are pretty major sites and they managed to bring in more than 8,000 hits to the video. 82 people have favored the video, putting it at #19 on Youtube’s Most Viewed today and #15 on YouTube’s Top Favorites.

The comments on each of those pages are pretty funny. It took 6 hours on both sites for anyone to finally call B.S. on the video. One guy claims he took apart toasters and curling irons, looking for the crystal. And a guy chatting with me earlier today send me a link to an Ebay auction for a CB Radio, asking if that one would work with the mod. So not only are people going to take apart their toasters, but they’re also going to be buying CB radios. I am the biggest jerk ever! I’ve been giggling uncontrollably all day over all this. I can’t wait for the angry emails to start pouring in.

Made a new PLA Radio on Friday. Went hiking in Eugene on Saturday morning. Went out with Deanna last night. Going to search for an elusive Geocache today.

Took the kids to their mom’s around 11, then drove to Portland. Spent the day at Saturday Market, downtown, and Lloyd Center (I always park there since it’s free, then take the Max everywhere). I brought my laptop and meant to get some stuff done on it, but never got around to it. Around 7, drove to The Green Dragon for my first ever Portland Fark Party. I’ve been missing them for the past two years either because I forgot or because I had the kids on those nights. The bar had a shitty band and lousy food. The shitty band limited my socializing to about 4 people since I couldn’t hear anything on the other side of the table. About 15 people showed up and it ended around 11:30. Me and two others headed to a new bar (with much quieter karaoke instead) on the other side of town. I must have left there at 2:15 because I got home around 3:30am.

Today I failed at sleeping in. I woke around 8 and got up around 9. But since it’s daylight savings I technically woke at 9 and got up at 10. Bought a Pepsi from 7-Eleven to try and wake myself up (My first Pepsi of the year, I think). Watched most of T-2, then put together this Mildred Monday song for the rest of the evening. I wrote that in 1997 and I’ve been meaning to do that ever since then. It’s not done - the sound levels are all wacky.

Geez, where did my day go? I didn’t start the song thing until 5 or 6. I must have fallen asleep at some point. I didn’t do anything today.

What’s up with haikus? I hate haikus and anyone who writes them. No really, what’s so clever about them? I just read a history of haikus hoping for a little understanding, but I still don’t get it. And I don’t understand why they’re so common in America. Nobody should like them, because they’re dumb.