"The Avengers" wasn't that great

For a weekend where I had deliberately planned nothing except for dinner with a friend on Friday night, it was a busy one.
Let's start with dinner.  I met up with R at Browns at 6pm.  "Dinner" went until past midnight and I think I rolled in around 12:45am after having texted Michael around 10pm that I'd be home shortly.
Whoops.
Saturday was a nice day so we went for a really hilly six mile run and I was despondent about our overall pace.  Even though I don't have another race for almost a year, and shouldn't really be running to begin with.
Road runners are stupid.
Anyways, then we went out with some friends for dinner and watched "Win Win" on Netflix which was pretty good.
Sunday we started the whole paring down process as we're going to move into my place for July 1st.  Holy crap.  Things got a little tense.  I counted like six pairs of Michael's running shoes in the closet and then I discovered he had another box of them hidden away.  I said "You have more running shoes than I have shoe shoes".
His comeback was that who am I to determine what is the appropriate amount of something that someone should have.
And, granted, I'm on a minimalistic, anti-materialism, anti-consumerism kick.  Partially this is because things are things and I just don't covet the vast majority of things that much, but I'd be a fool to not acknowledge that if I had a three bedroom house I might be a little more receptive to having more of these aforementioned things. 
It's like those certain girls who profess not to want to get married and are going to strike out in life as the fiery individualists that they are, when in fact really, it's just that their boyfriends don't want to get married.  Changing the story to fit the narrative, as Michael calls it.
Partially, too, this is because my father managed to fill a four car garage and a barn full of things.  Things that my mother and he had to wade through when they sold their house and were going to move into a condo in Kits.  Things that my mother, then, had to deal with when my father died.
After taking a bit of a breather Michael did select no small amount of antiquated electronics, jackets he no longer wears, and random furniture that I had been utterly unaware was ferreted away in the apartment, and we dropped it off at the Salvation Army before meeting a friend to go see "The Avengers".
Meh.
Today we made two trips down to the Sally Anne.  I got rid of so much crap.  My goal today was to clean out my storage locker and holy jesus, I couldn't believe what I got rid of.  Accounting and marketing and communications books that I paid hundreds if not thousands of dollars for back when I was in college which are now utterly obsolete.  Yearbooks. Yes: I turfed my yearbooks.  Knick knack shit.  I hate knick knacks.  Mirrors.  I just absolutely burned and slashed.
I swear I halved the crap in my storage space.  Now it's home to: four snow tires: a guitar I will seriously one day learn to play; a tennis racket that I will use again; a coffee table my father made; and some Christmas/childhood trinkets (Rainbow Brite!  She-Ra!).
I just can't get over how much one accumulates as they move through life.  I donated a box and a half of books today and it pained me to give some of them up.  A cappuccino machine.  A hand held blender.  And still I look around my slightly barren apartment and think there is more that can go but we hold on for such weird reasons.  Sentimentality.  The pleasure it gives us to know that we have things.  Things that we don't currently use but might some day.  Things that at one time brought us pleasure but now we only take them out and touch them once or twice a year.  Things that we thought we would have spent more time with.  Things that we bought because they made us feel like we could be someone else at the time.
I used to walk into my father's garage, smell the cool, musty concrete, the old and aged tools and look up at the pictures of women in thong bikinis with feathered hair astride motorcycles wearing brightly colored thongs.  Stephanie Seymour was up there.  So was Rachel Hunter.  There were innumerable drawers of pliers and bolts and nails and screws of every size.  Tires, toilets, hedge trimmers, an old hot water heater, winches.  He had so much stuff. 
With all that stuff he built an entire house up at Lasqueti - by himself - which he rented out.
Who does that?
I look at all the paltry, useless things I've dragged along with me over the years.  For what?
When we went to Lasqueti the last time there wasn't a lot of sentimentality there.  He had small, elementary school photos of me and my brother up on the fridge.  He had some photos of me and Jay as little kids that I had nicely framed up on the wall.  The rest of it?  Saw horses and kayaks and pike poles and banks of batteries and log splitters.
Though he did manage to open up the large dial that showed the temperature and somehow manage to slot a picture of a Bo-Derek look a like inside of it.