I smite thee! ...The Diary of Nod

It's just an envelope, stupid!

There are times when I'm struck by a realization so amazingly obvious after the fact that I feel blazingly moronic for failing to see it earlier. Then I consider that no one ever mentioned it to me, and the thought, far more frightening than my own idiocy, devolves to encompass the stupidity of everyone around me for their unmatched ignorance. It is bliss, they say.

I don't know when recycling became important to me; at some point I realized how easy it was and how much it could accomplish and I've been working for it ever since. I turned much of my packrat ways around to reuse and renew rather than simply storing. Baby food jars are perfect for small screws and wire ties (or use 35mm film cannisters or medicine bottles); baby formula cans (just like coffee cans) hold many computer parts, larger screws, zip ties; baby wipe holders (seeing a pattern?) are built just like toolboxes; I used an empty tea cannister for assorted small tubes of medicine and miscellaneous, cleaning up a particularly baneful cabinet in my kitchen. My largest challenge has been disposing of the vast amounts of cardboard in my garage, mostly from delivery packages (very large segments of cardboard).

I was cleaning up my office last week. Many receipts were covering my desk, waiting to be sorted into envelopes for storage in case of an audit; I had run out of envelopes and the ones I had were far too large, security envelopes where I prefer the smaller correspondence size. As I was sorting credit card statements, I threw the remainder of the mailer in my recycle bin.

I was throwing envelopes into recycling.

Along with each original envelope, often damaged by mailing and rough opening, was a reply envelope for my payment. Much smaller than what I'd had, these were perfect. I immediately fished out the others from my recycle bin and paperclipped them together to sort my receipts later (which I did).

No one had ever mentioned the idea of reusing reply envelopes. When I think about it, it's so amazingly simple. How many other things are overlooked? As a child, I recall going upstairs to my grandparents' apartment and scribbling all over sheets of paper my grandmother had brought home from the community center, mostly flyers that were blank on one side and perfect for my work. We live in such lifestyles of abundance, we often overlook the simplicity.

posted by Lachlan @ 11:42 PM