Heading to Boston tomorrow to drop Sailor off with Lisa at Grenadier Golden Retrievers and Frisket with Alister and Abigail. The dogs get a little break from us while we travel to Australia.

It's been raining a lot here. I spent Wednesday driving eleven miles in two hours to get the car serviced. Any other day, any other week I would have just canceled but we leave next Tuesday and I wanted to have everything squared away before we left.

After spending the two hours driving to the dealer, and another three waiting for the car to be finished, I had less than two hours to return home and then try to figure out how to get to the UES for a doctor's appointment. Doing the math, which I was never really good at, I decided to scratch returning home and drove into Manhattan on what was likely the worst non-holiday driving day of the past year.

Not to go into too many details, but I've had a problem with swallowing food on and off since college. It's gotten significantly worse in the past year and apparently is due to stomach acid making its way to places it doesn't belong, coupled with the side-effects of some medication I've been using for psoriasis and eczema. The net result is that I'm on a no-caffeine, no-smoking, no-chocolate, no-alcohol, no-acidy foods diet for at least the next six weeks (with some dispensation for my travels in Oz). The chocolate, smoking (hah), even the alcohol ban don't concern me as much as the no-caffeine. Not quite sure how I'll deal with jetlag without the requisite dozen litres of Coke or Pepsi.

The dogs are off getting bathed right now. Not sure it's going to be worth the effort to get them dried off as it's 110% humidity out right now.

Following up Everything is Detritus, some other blog posts on having too much stuff:

• The Tyranny of Stuff from Get Rich Slowly
• Why Is It So Hard To Let Go Of All That Stuff? from the Attention Deficit Disorder Association
• Stuff by Paul Graham: What I didn't understand was that the value of some new acquisition wasn't the difference between its retail price and what I paid for it. It was the value I derived from it. Stuff is an extremely illiquid asset. Unless you have some plan for selling that valuable thing you got so cheaply, what difference does it make what it's "worth?" The only way you're ever going to extract any value from it is to use it. And if you don't have any immediate use for it, you probably never will.
• On having too much stuff
• Jettison the junk: why clutter clouds your mind and saps your energy

I have been slowly making my way through a variety of boxes and have gotten rid of perhaps 80-90% of the stuff I've found but it's slow going and kind of boring. I threw away a lot of Olympic memorabilia. I'm sure some of it had value, but only if I took the time to list items on eBay or elsewhere, and then deal with the inevitable scam artists and returns. It was far easier to stick it on the curb, and more rewarding to see the scavengers take it. I don't know whether they'll use the stuff themselves or sell it, nor do I care.