Pieces of String too Short to Save

I've been trying to justify any TV watching time lately by multi-tasking and either sorting through some old files that have pile up or working on something crafty. The crafty projects have been winning. This weekend while working my way though my last 6 Lost episodes to prepare for it's long awaited return tonight (WOOHOO!!!!), I pulled out a box labeled "Embroidery" to sort through.

And of course before being able to do anything "productive" I got totally side-tracked by sorting through the random odds and ends in the box. Glad to know that this form of procrastination is not only work specific for me. While on writing assignments I can somehow go from looking up on a word online at Merriam-Webster to reading Zach Braff's IMDB profile to a Wikipedia page on the history of the Ruby Red Slippers in the Wizard of Oz…all the while mentally justifying the time spent in some way or another.

In the box was a HUGE tangled pile of embroidery floss that was easily two feet by two feet, bigger then pet ferret sized and just smaller then 30 pound alley cat size. I started to unwind it and sort it to see if there was anything usable in there and maybe inspire me to stitch something. I've just come across www.subversivecrossstitch.com and I am addicted to finding the perfect project to start. Which in all truth I will spend 4 times the amount of time looking for a project then I will actually completing the project.

Anyways, a few hours and 4 Lost episodes later the string reminded me of a poetry class that I got dragged too years ago. The class had the standard lonely female divorcees writing angry poems and a handful of very odd men trying to create mid-word rhymes. This left just two of us in the class to compete over the grand prize of pithiest lines of verse, bordering on limericks. And I got heinously beat out of the smart-ass, clever-chair one evening when my competitor wrote a poem about realizing that she knew what it meant to be old when she came across a shoe box on her Grandma's craft shelf labeled, "String to Small to Save."

String to Small to Save – for years I've wondered, "What made the pieces too small to toss too?" By this point, I was wrapping episode 5 and on the home stretch. I had several freshly wound spools, labeled and sorted in one box and a Ziploc bag of some random pieces that I begin to label, yes: "String to Small to Save." I can't decide if the bag of small pieces to save made sense. I could use them for all those mending projects I don't ever do, or for little accents on projects I never finish here and there. But in all honesty, am I just actually justifying my pack-rat nature here or is it more a subconscious way of noting, "Whoa, I'm getting REALLY old?"