the fluxen peril

Where once there were some shelves full of stuff there are now some empty shelves with a couple of dead AAA cells sitting on them. Where there were four or five piles of paper-based miscellany there are now two neat file boxes. Unfortunately it now means that where there was a wall and a bed there is now a wall with a load of boxes piled against it, then a bed, then a gap barely large enough for the wardrobe doors to open. There's a bloke coming to rip out the kitchen ceiling then plaster all the walls on Monday so whilst Nicky was down at her allotment with her co-allotmentee and a press-ganged colleague constructing the shed they bought last September (and have been storing in their office since) I was boxing things up and moving them about, all the while making sure that anything with any component of magnetic data storage was kept a long way from anything which might generate a magnetic field. Parents: if you have childs of the understanding-speech age then please now take a quick five minutes to educate them about the dangers of placing magnetic storage media anywhere near magnetic objects as Nicky's dad apparently failed to do when she was small. I know this is no longer as easy to demonstrate as it was during the 1980s when a quickly hissed "never put video cassettes on top of the television/audio cassettes on the speakers" was all that was required but please do your best; it'll save some hassle in the long run.

Although this box only contains fridge magnets of extreme weakness whose field strength probably doesn't even reach one attotesla my irrational fear of accidental corruption was such that I eventually shoved these far underneath the kitchen cupboards just in case they found their way to a shelf next to the boxed-up external hard drives (now containing a backup of up to yesterday (and when my parents go back home after visiting in a couple of weeks' time they'll be taking a duplicate with them to stick in the loft)) or the childhood tape-recordings I'm meant to be digitally/optically archiving at some point or even the big box of audio cassettes underneath the bed.

Far more dangerous are my speakers and amp but they'll be staying where they are after a protective coating of binbag has been applied.

It's surprising how large a pile of crap looks when it's in a pile next to a wall rather than on the shelves where it's been for the last couple of years with only minor adjustments to small parts at any one time. The chest of drawers formerly on the non-wall side is a significant proportion of the new pile but just the collection of wooden Ikea drawer things stacked on top of it reaches above head height. If I'd have had time I would have gone through them to weed out the utterly useless crap (including most of the three drawers of CDs containing several backup copies each of various deceased versions of operating systems and software) but it'll have to wait for another time. As I was mostly just repacking I didn't get to poke through the rest of the stuff much but the odd bit I did see seemed a little more useless than when I last had to go through it and didn't throw it away; a good sign as it means it might eventually be edited from the pile into the bin on the next sweep.