One Man's Trash is Another Man's Art Supplies

The purpose of reality television is to make us feel better about ourselves.  And by "us", I mean "me" because I know that one of life's great pleasures is drinking while watching Intervention or eating snacks while watching some TLC show about the morbidly obese.  Hoarders/Hoarding: Buried Alive is slightly less fun since it reminds me that I have tons of useless crap mixed in with my awesome things, and I cannot watch most of the episodes with animals because those people are monsters.

As a disgusting slattern and filth wizard (7th House, Order of Merlin), I've been keeping two bags of travel memorabilia in a dresser drawer for years.  It's all ticket stubs, brochures, and other stuff that either didn't make it into a scrapbook or I never made the scrapbook.  But of course I can't throw it away because it's a treasure trove of memories!  The bus or metro tickets I don't remember and can't figure out the actual city for!  A candy wrapper that I probably didn't eat the candy for!  Bags I was given for purchasing other souvenirs!

Since it's not two bags of kittens, this problem can be solved by decoupage.  I know I normally recommend solving everything with a hot glue gun, but I also enjoy avoiding burns on my fingertips.  The big plan was to take the ugly table I'm getting if I ever trick anyone into giving me a full time job and gluing a bunch of crap from  the Continent on it.  Since I had no idea how mod podge interacts with 8 year old airplane tickets, I decided to start with one of those woodcrafting blocks.

Success!  Also, now I can just get more woodblocks and procrastinate either hauling down my ugly table or attempting to decoupage in the sweltering heat of the attic.

Something else I've learned from this experiment is that I don't think I ever scrapbooked my trip through Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, and Denmark.  I should probably add that to the scrapbook queue and rationalize hoarding more paper scraps until I someday get around to putting together an album for a trip I took ten years ago.  Right after I accept that, holy shit, that was ten years ago and stop weeping over my lost youth.

Since I've already made enough scrapbooks for London, that seemed a good subject for the next woodblock.

A quick personality test: you discover a paper crown you've been saving for an amount of time that can't possibly be right because you're not that old.  Do you A)wallow in your youth because you have nothing that old, B)throw it away like a sane person, or C)see an opportunity?

Yeah, I'm one of the best arguments you'll see for stifling children's creativity.  If I hadn't been encouraged in my mad whims and desire to glue stuff onto other stuff, I would not be saving all kinds of stupid crap "just in case."  Except by "just in case" I mean, "I shoved it in a drawer and forgot about it for awhile."  The point is that creativity is about unique problem solving.  Like not throwing things away because someday you might need to glue them to something.

The Student and Adult travelcards worked out pretty nicely.  Good job, Past Me!  Well, except for whatever the hell that haircut was supposed to be.

There's a mixing of years, but it was either that or keep hoarding ticket stubs, bags, and out-dated public transport cards for a city I no longer live in.  Next step: maybe considering throwing out that Brighton Rock before it acquires sentience.