Medieval February

We spent most of yesterday playing life-sized Sokoban in our apartment, sorting through old paper and rearranging books in the shelves. It really is amazing how much paper amasses in just a few years, even when we both try to discard old sheets and slips of whatever paper that are not needed anymore.

There is one exception for me when throwing away paper, though: Any artwork I made myself stays. Period. In some cases, even the preparatory sheets for the final thing.

And in addition to that, I admit I'm a bit reluctant to throw away old bills from computer parts, because I kind of like to rediscover them after some years.
Do you know this feeling of utter amazement (paired with relief that these times are past) when you read what you paid for, say, a 128 MB USB-stick back in the early 2000s or for 128 MB of RAM (simple RAM for a desktop PC) back in 2001? Blimey, those things were expensive! Yet they were needed, and we paid for them.

And now? 50 Euros for a 32 GB USB-Stick. 512 MB sticks given out as freebies on job fairs.
Amazing.

And then I think of the one Gigabyte RAM happily working away in my slightly elderly laptop (and 1 GB is all it will take) and how long some necessary procedures take... and I imagine doing this on 128 MB of RAM because what that cost 2001 is approximately what I paid for my GB in 2006 or 2007.
Impossible.

Oh, by the way, culling old paper or books is so fitting into the medieval calendar. As Got Medieval tells us, February is the month to trim back dead bits from the trees. Paper = made from wood pulp. Therefore paper = trees, dead bits of trees = paper stuff not needed anymore.
(And since there is an archaeologist in this household, and there are small bits of real wood around as well from past projects, we even managed the get-some-firewood part. Neat, huh?)