Day Two of the first assult on the Evil Magazine population that is taking over my home.
So far so good. Made a dent, a small one but still one. I set up a system of file folders with topics like Health, Training, Hooves, Feeding, Breeding, Tack...etc I cut the binding off a magazine and flip through it pulling out the bad stuff and putting it in one pile and the good stuff in another pile. I paper clip anything that is more then one page(but this causes a problem, see below). After that magazine is in piles I grab my stack of folders and put each item in it's folder. Anything that is a series I put in the back of the folder with all of them stuck in a big paper clip because I'm not going through the mabazines in order. That would have required me to haul the whole collection(is it called a collection when it is this large! lol) into the livingroom and that wasn't going to work. Then I move on to the next.
Unlike some I am keeping(for now) the indexes out of each. I'm doing this simply to keep trace of how many. Put it up there with the "Thou shalt not harm a book" idea, I need my little odd things from time to time and this is one of them. All will be tossed at the end of this.
The Problems with Paper Clips. Such simple things, should harm a flea, heack a guy once traded one little red one for a house(in a round about way) but paper clips cause problems. After doing 24 magazines I found that not only is my "health" and "Training" folders too thick to handle easily but that every file ends up with one corner thicker then the rest so they don't stay stacked. And the other problem caused by paper clips...or my lack of foresigth is that I do not have an endless supply of them. So I had to break down and dig out the binders, page colors, lable maker(I know how can someone as Organize challege as me own a lable maker!

) and set down with the health and training to put them into binders. I figured since the rest of the file folders are nearly empty I can just wait on those until the next trip to Office Max to get the binders and stuff for them. So I group things in each. As I do this I was able ti weed out a few more things that I just didn't feel like putting into those protectors.
Why do this when some can live happily without keeping this pile of dead trees? It's called Weaning. I can't just go cold turkey. Maybe as the years go by more articles out of this first(really first and second) weeding will be tossed. But There are some things I want. Yes a lot of the training things I will remember if I have a need for them at that time and use them so that they stay in my blonde brain. The trouble with that is that there are things I know I can't use right now but that will use in the future like the articles on Jumping, Cutting, etc. I don't have a jumper right now and I haven't for about 5 yrs but I would like to get back into it. Cutting I would love to get into but can't right now. So this things get kept. Anything on Reining also. Things like Colic, Founder,ect. Yes I can look it up the net but I had weeding through a websearch and sometimes the magazine doesn't have a website with a search able full length articles or you have to Sub. to them to get them.
The biggest reason I am doing this is so that I can walk into the house, grab the binder on training head back out and give a student a couple articles to read or if someone is dealing with WLD or IR I can have articles on hand to help them. Actually for both of those I have huge binders already but now I can add more to them.