Receipts!

My husband recently accepted a work transfer to Georgia. Our move provides enough material for infinite Daily Fret blogs all by itself since we've both lived in Illinois our entire lives, and we don't know anyone in Georgia. But we'll get to that later. Later, as in some day when I'm not buried under a ton of garbage in every room in my house, trying to clean stuff out and pack. Which is why I haven't written a blog in maybe two weeks.

Anyway, today's Fret isn't about Georgia or the fact that I don't particularly care for peaches or the impending need for me to drive 12 hours in my car with a bunch of angry, crying cats in the backseat the whole way. Today's problem is that I can never find anything I'm looking for! We're preparing to sell our house, so I have to look back through my file cabinets and boxes of papers and random piles of paperwork stashed under furniture to find details about this place so we can offer it for sale. Because we're being relocated through my husband's company, we need to tell them how much we paid for our house, what's wrong with it, what kind of remodeling we've done over the past 10 years, and whether the place smells like cats.

In order to buy a new house in Georgia, we also have to dig up every bit of financial data we've ever come in contact with, including tax forms, pay stubs, and written receipts from the Salvation Army collection guy who we gave a dollar to last Christmas. Fortunately, I've got most of this stuff because I'm a packrat. Sadly, there's always one piece of paper - a vital piece of paper that's the key to every other piece - that I can't find. On Thursday, for instance, I literally spent from noon to 4 p.m. looking for a property tax bill from 2010. Oh, I had 2009 and 2011, but I needed 2010 and couldn't find it for 4 hours. It took so long because I had every other piece of paper from 2010, and I needed to search under them in order to find what I needed. The online version of the bill didn't have the one little detail that I needed, so I had to search. And eventually discover that it was where it should have been, but the paperclip had fallen off, so the page had gotten stuffed to the bottom of the tax envelope.

And it's not  just home-related stuff that goes missing. Today I had to find a receipt for my son's computer so he could get warranty service. We bought the extended, in-home warranty, so we're going to use it! But first I have to spend 2 hours looking for the receipt. It should have been in email, but it wasn't. Every other email was there. I have about 200 junk mails about buying low cost ink cartridges alone, but can I find the thing I need? Of course not.

So the moral of this story is that you can save 1000 tiny pieces of paper and have them filed clearly in just the right place, but the one you need won't be there when you need it. It makes me think that I should just throw all paperwork and receipts away immediately. Then I'll at least know that I don't have what I need, and I don't have to waste hours searching for it.