Stuff

Larissa's sister is arriving shortly before the wedding to stay with us and so the room we mainly use for junk will be needed to house her. With that, and summer move to Egypt getting closer, we thought we'd make a start on clearing some stuff out.

I quite like sifting through old stuff and binning it. I'm not a hoarder at all, and tend to only keep a few things of sentimental value. Over the years, I have stripped down what I own (with the help of cyclone Gonu which destroyed quite a lot) to a few small boxes of things containing old photos, gifts from friends when I left Edinburgh, silly Christmas stocking toys, letters and cinema tickets.

Everything else gets shoved into the 'three week rule' whereby I look at it, determine whether or not I'll need it within the next three weeks, and then bin or keep it accordingly. The irony of this of course that it's four weeks after you throw something you originally thought of as completely useless out that you end up actually needing it.

If I could, I'd eBay everything to try and get a bit of money but it's just not possible out here. Instead, we place everything neatly next to the communal bin for others to use if they want.

What stresses me out the most about the short trip to the bin is not the rotten stinking fly-ridden nature of it but rather the sand that surrounds it. It's a very fine and dusty substance that looks and feels like sand but behaves like dogshit in as much that it doesn't come off your shoe easily and can mess up the floors in the house.

Very odd stuff.

Another thing that stresses me out is that you get a lot of binnus-caticus around these parts who like to scavenge what they can from the bins. The time I threw some rubbish in only to have a cat shriek and jump out gave me one of the biggest frights of my short Omani life. (I tend to throw pre-emptive stones at the bin now to scare the cats off first).

Whenever we do a clear-out, the neighbours help themselves pretty quickly. There are lots of poor (in a monetary sense) Indians around my area who find the things we throw out of much greater value than we ever will; an iron, photo frames, bed linen, telephone and a storage box were all snapped up within a few minutes.

My rather large and heavy collection of T3 and Stuff magazines were thrown right to the bottom due to the fact that despite being gadget/technology magazines, they tend to have many pictures of scantily clad women holding said gadgets/technology.

I wouldn't want to get a bad reputation in the street now would I?