Spring Cleaning Nostalgia

So I finally managed to buy a place (out in Surrey, of course, where it's still marginally affordable!), though fully leveraged, and although the closing date won't be till late February (!), I thought I should start to sift through all the stuff that's accumulated over the years.

Spring cleaning this winter yielded a heck of a lot of loose papers (lots of little free pads from local realtors), business cards from people I maybe called once, and also a bunch of photographs from the two major vacations I'd taken in my life.

I took those vacations "alone" -- that is, I went on my own and ended up lumped with a bunch of other people on vacation. One was a cruise with fixed seating dinners; the other was a bus tour of Europe, with a bus full of people from various countries.

I never did share a lot about my vacations, because no one was really interested when I got back. So there was no one to share it with. Made some friends on the trip, but -- and maybe this isn't true for everyone -- nothing lasting.

So what do I do with all these pictures?

I also dredged up some pictures and keepsakes from way back when, during the time I worked at King George International College as an ESL teaching assistant. Of everything that I'd ever kept as a keepsake, those mean the most to me. And yet, with no connection left to anyone who'd given them to me, what do they really mean now? And won't they be just meaningless junk when I'm gone?

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I'm not sure what to do with them at this point, but keeping them around physically doesn't seem to be necessarily the right thing. I hadn't pulled them out in literally years, and that's almost the same as not having them at all.

For now, I'm uploading the pictures onto my Flickr account, which promises to keep anything anyone uploads "forever". And as I continue spring cleaning and memories come back, I'll post a few stories of the good times and where I am now.