Fighting the Packrat

I come from a line of packrats on both sides of my family. Over the years our family has bought stuff and been given stuff. But as packrats, we do not get rid of old stuff. This leads to eventually packing it away in spare cupboards, drawers, shelves, closets or putting it in boxes and storing it in my parent's crawlspace.

A packrat's motto is "I can't throw it away because I might need it someday." Experience dictates this is true, but you will never need it UNTIL you get rid of it. My grandfather also had to deal with an additional problem: "Hey it's on sale, I better buy two."

I spent my early years accumulating stuff and "saving it for later" without realizing what it would eventually lead to.... clutter!! I would save things like it was being taken off the market. Our crawlspace always had room for one more box. Nothing really brought this issue to light...until I had to move. Oh MAN!!! Years and years of stuff is not easy to downsize, so I never did. But after moving I was determined that I would sort through all my stuff rather than just store it, because I had just moved into a condo with no crawlspace. And if I wanted a roommate, I would have to move my stuff out of the spare bedroom.

Thirty one years old and I decided to fight the inner packrat. Some people have a one year rule (if I haven't used it in the last year, it goes). I think I needed to set a 10 year give-or-take rule. Not great but it's a start. I sorted my post secondary education notes and threw out a stack of notes 3 feet high (and I still kept eight 3" binders of notes). There were boxes of comic books, wires, $26 in pennies, brand new packages of oragami paper from when my dad taught Japanese exchange students in the '80s, more wires, floppy discs, pictures, miscellaneous electronic junk, and boxes and boxes of miscellaneous trinkety stuff. Everything was sorted to one of 4 places: garbage, recycling, MCC or a new box of sorted stuff. I have never gone through that much stuff
in my life. It is VERY time consuming, so I might add that my recent job termination was very timely.

After all the sorting that I've done I've come to realize that life is too short to hoard stuff. We need to be generous and give it away or else we end up with more stuff than we know what to do with. If I haven't used it in 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years then I probably never will. And if I really need it again, I can always buy a new one.

I got a JOB

Mere hours after I announced to the facebook world that I lost my job, my friend Michael informed me of some engineering positions opening at his company in Victoria. I had visited this place last year and I was very impressed by what I saw. It really looked like they had their act together as a company, and I really wanted to work there. But that never panned out, and I ended up landing a job in Langley. Uh, then I was let go (see previous post).

I immediatelly applied to the place in Victoria, and after two rounds of interviews, they offered me a position in engineering!

So looking back, I see that God has a plan. Working at the job in Langley was a great stepping stone. It gave me confidence in my abilities, and enabled me to buy a place in Abbotsford and live away from home but not far from home. Had I moved to Victoria last year, it would have been a lot harder on me. Now I'm ready to take on living farther from my friends and family. That's God's timing. Ya gotta love it.

Canned

Well, after 10 months of faithful service, my employer decided to trim the fat off an already lean staff, and eliminate some positions. Mine was one of them. This termination had nothing to do with my performance, as I was relieved to find out. It was the weak US dollar that is mostly to blame since most of the products are sold to the states (and paid for in US dollars--all of a sudden it was very unprofitable to accept payment in US currency). Perhaps my jumping up and down yelling "in your face America" (as per the previous post) was a little premature.

Nobody likes getting canned, and I had just bought a condo in Abbotsford a mere 5 months prior. But I've totally felt at peace, and have been confident that God had something else planned for me.