Vanilla flavoured coca-cola is kind of nice. Tastes a bit like the sugar paste eggs you get at Easter...

After I got off-line earlier today (got kicked off actually, damn connection dropped out - again) I had the mad urge to rummage around in our bursting-at-the-seams garage to try and find a box of comics I'd stashed. Couldn't find it, it either wasn't where I thought I'd left it, or the comics had been shunted into a different box during the last clean-up, either way, it's going to take more than a cursory search to find the things. However, I thought that while I was there - and 'sorting through the boxes' is on my list of things to do before the next move - I might as well drag out a random box out and go through it.
It's always... odd going through old stuff, not all of the associated memories are happy ones. I wondered why I tended to hang on to stuff I wasn't comfortable with and came to the conclusion that rather than deal with the sticky, gluey echoes of past uncomfort I'd shove the associated physical objects into boxes out of sight. If I didn't have the reminders around me, I couldn't remember - problem solved... Until it comes time, for whatever reason, to look in the boxes.
In my defense, I had a massive clean out a couple of years ago before a house move (five years in one place tends to pile up the crap) and got rid of a lot of the pointless stuff I'd been dragging around with me for decades. It was very liberating, but there's still pockets of old, unpleasant reminders lurking, and now feels like the time to deal with them.

*grin* Having said all that, the box I pulled out today wasn't so bad.
There was a mis-matched assortment of tupperware (no doubt the matching bits will be found in another box in the garage - I'll clean that lot up and stick it in a cupboard; there was a double handful of seashells, monochromatic whites and creams but the growth patterns on some of them are just beautiful - I'll clean those up and put them somewhere. (It might be worthwhile
pointing out now that this box had come from being stored under my mother's house, which while dry, was dusty and mouse-ridden.) I found the plastic jar that contained my wisdom teeth - I'd had them extracted in, um, '85? '86? and I dug out a shopping bags worth of assorted plastic kitchen ware that will be going straight to the op-shop.
I also found my old ceramic Bambi & Thumper coin bank which I got for xmas when I was, I don't know, 10 or 12, heh, maybe younger? (I can still remember sitting on my bed, xmas morning, and reaching into the traditional xmas pillow-case - that my brother and I left at the ends of our beds on xmas eve - pulling out and unwrapping the box that held this thing.) The bank was gold coloured, but it had most of the colour burnt off it in a fire several years ago. I don't know why I keep it, it's not really salvageable and I'll never use it again, but I'm reluctant to toss it out, it's one of the few things remaining from my middle child-hood - it will probably go back into a box to be unearthed again at a later date.
But the most intersting thing in this box was a scrap-book I'd made up years ago, holding the tickets and programs, news articles of things I'd gone to see in the early 80's. The first item was from the Cliff Richard concert here in 1982 - don't blame me, mine and my friend's mums wanted to go see him! (Though it was a good concert as I blushingly recall.) There was also programs from
the Duran Duran concert (1983), the film premier of Wrath of Khan 1982 (heh, near mint, wonder if I could sell that on ebay?), ET 1982, and a whole bunch of stuff from the huge outdoor, day long, concert held at the Melbourne showgrounds in 1984. The Police head-lined at that event, and it was worth the sunburn and waiting through the other acts (Bryan Adams, would you believe, was one of them, Men at Work - remember them?, The Sunnyboys...)
to see them rock through tracks off the Synchronicity album.

It's funny that it was this particular box I pulled out of the garage cos as I was getting the cubs ready for school this morning, I was trying to remember the last concert I went to. I think it was that Police one... no, hang on, I went to see Sting's - Dream of the Blue Turtle tour in, um, '86, and then saw The Melody Lords (a glam cover/satire band) at a pub in '88, I think. Wow, that's a long time ago...