Stuff I Gave Away – Today’s Shortlist

• sandbox toys that were sun-faded and cracked;

• perfectly good weather-stripping that we don’t need;

• tennis balls faded to grey;

• decorative Christmas twigs spray-painted a garish gold that have left sparkly droppings everywhere they’ve been for the last five years; and

• my e-subscription to the World Intellectual Property Organizations’s SME Newsletter. Every month when this periodical arrives in my in-box, I file it under “To Read” and feel a pang of failure for never, ever actually reading it. (SME = Small & Medium Enterprise). To heck with it.