Hoarding I

When I was cleaning my room a couple of weeks ago, I made decisions to throw out a few of the items.  This is one of those items: Sports-N-Stuff tickets.

Sports-N-Stuff is a place for kids and teenagers: they have sports, like a basketball court and batting cages, and stuff, like a video game room and laser tag.  I think my first visit was during the summer of 1991, when imy day camp made a visit.  If I’m wrong about that, then it was no later than 1993-1994.  Anyway, the place was awesome.  Video games and batting cages???  How cool was that?  Unfortunately, I didn’t get too many chances to visit because it was not easy to get to without a car.  I did make a couple of trips with friends when I did get a car, and those trips were fun as well.

These tickets are from the video games they had over there – some games, like skeeball, (or maybe it was all games) gave you tickets after you played them, and you can exchange the tickets for anything they had over there, which were mostly toys.  Of course, most people only get enough tickets for a plastic monkey or a pencil set, so those remote-control cars were just pipe dreams.

I must not have had the time to cash in the tickets one time and just kept them.  And after that, whenever I had to clean my room or was moving to another house, I kept these tickets.  It wasn’t that hard, since I kept them in a small pouch, and just threw it in with the rest of my crap.  I wasn’t going to go out of my way to cash them in, but if I happened to be driving by, I planned on making a stop.  Two little problems with that plan was that 1. I never drove by, and 2. tickets were in the back of my desk drawer so I probably wouldn’t even have remembered.

So finally, I decided to cut my losses.  After almost 15 years, I threw out the Sports-N-Stuff tickets.  I finally started thinking smart.  I had about 150 – 200 tickets here… what could I possibly get with that?  A mini pencil sharpener?  More crap to take up space?  It was not worth it.  I bagged it.

In case it isn’t clear, I am kind of a hoarder.  I am nowhere near the hoarder that those people on the show are, but I do like to keep things that hold value

, no matter how little it may be.  But I am learning to simplify my life, and learning to let go of these little things.  I threw out a couple of other items, and I will continue on “Hoarding II”.