Spring Burning

Today it was just cold enough overnight that I decided I should restart the fire in the fireplace. This turned out to be useful, as Lisa, who has been going through the garage trying to tidy up, found a Banker's box of old papers and asked me to go through it. It turned out that almost everything in the box did not need to be kept, as it was mostly old statements from banks, credit cards, insurance, etc., most of it from before we moved in to Fernley House in 2011. That includes, for example, receipts from Worldcon trips way back then, which I decided I no longer need to retain. I set aside the small amount of things I wanted to keep, separated burnable material from non-burnable (like coated paper or plastic), and started feeding it into the fireplace. There was a lot of it. It has been burning for many hours as I write this, and is likely to burn for several more.

Burning this material is much more efficient than trying to shred it. Indeed, shredding probably would have burned out the shredder unless I spread the destruction out over many days. And besides, these old papers are generating as much heat as several fire logs here on what might be the last fire day of the season. (You never know until much later when no more fires were necessary, of course.)