I've never figured out why, but I'm hard on keyboards. The present one is on its last legs, the letters worn off and the caps cratered. Luckily I ordered a new one a few weeks ago, and will shortly replace it with a fresh one.

I live in one of those 1920s Montreal apartments with a built-in corner cabinet – these are pervasive, with glassed doors on the top, a drawer in the middle, and a closed cupboard on the bottom. (Anyone who lives here will have seen dozens of these - they were put into every damn apartment of this vintage.)

I've been girding myself to shift out all the dead junk that has arrived in the bottom cupboard. Most of it is either old computer hardware or peripherals, or cables that are no longer useful. And conveniently, someone left two perfectly good large Rubbermaid trash bins under our staircase, ages ago. Nobody ever uses them. So I've commandeered one and am filling it with electro junk. I may need to commandeer both eventually.

Now the thing is: do I spend good money on a taxi to the Eco Centre like a good citizen, and waste an afternoon dealing with sorting this junk into bins while being shouted at by bad-tempered city employees, or do I give in to my weaker impulses and put it out with the regular garbage pickup on Friday?

There are, by the way, now 11 badly eroded keyboards in the bin. I'm about to add a 12th.

And as a footnote, not to worry. Döstädning is Swedish death cleaning, but there's nothing wrong with me. It's more a question of taking the attitude of “would anyone want this stuff if I were dead?” and then chucking out all the stuff you know they wouldn’t.