In early 2006, I was working a suit-and-tie job in the beauty industry, and I felt fat. Well, really, I was fat: I’d climbed back to the highest weight of my life, matching my high in the winter of 2001. That first time, it resulted in a two-week crash diet to fit into a tuxedo for a wedding, which led to six months of powerful weight loss, and I found myself thirty pounds lighter and thrilled.

In ’06, I lacked some of the motivations I had five years earlier, but I still wanted to work on my weight. I decided that I’d keep myself honest by weighing myself every day. And I put my weigh-ins into an Excel spreadsheet when I got into work each day so I could visualize my progress. I put “challenge” in the filename as an encouragement.

I’ve been jotting down my weight ever since, and in the same Excel file throughout. In 2009, a website and app called the Line Diet popularized this method of dieting, but I just kept at my spreadsheet, adding a fresh tab every now and again, and noting my weight whenever I stepped on the scale. I’m still at it: my last weigh-in was on Wednesday, and it’s in the file.

The other day I realized I had accumulated a full decade of health data in one place. So I pulled my charts into a single sheet to see how I’ve done with my weight.

The most interesting thing to me is that it’s not very interesting. I haven’t had any truly aggressive diets in a long time, so the recent years lack the big drops I had early on. And when my weight gets out of hand, I tend to abandon the scale, so the high end of my data is muted. (There’s interesting stuff hiding in there, though. For example, if you look closely, you can find the blank section where I went off the rails and gained 16 pounds in four months.)

The weigh-ins I do have show that I’ve basically stayed in the same 15-pound band for the past ten years. Not bad! And since my last truly heavy stretch, I’ve managed to lose more than 10 pounds and keep them off. This calendar year, in fact, my weight has tracked steadily downward.

More importantly, while I haven’t gotten back to skinny just yet, I’ve done well at keeping my weight in check. As of Wednesday, I was back within 10 pounds of what I weighed when I graduated high school, 25 years ago—not yet the slender guy from 2001, but a pretty good place to be. And thanks to my trusty Excel spreadsheet, I’m motivated again to try and get there.

I’m a bit of a packrat with my things, as much as Manhattan apartment living and my clutter-averse wife allow. Most of what I hang onto has some sort of emotional attachment: I have, for example, a bin full of pre-digital-camera photo albums, tucked away in the upper recesses of my closet. This I consider to be useful hoarding.

One thing I hang onto, and which I haven’t been able to quite reconcile, is old business cards.

Back in the 1990s, I began keeping a proper Rolodex to track the people I knew. I’m pretty sure it started when I was working at Billboard, tracking various freelancers and business contacts, and it was still common to look up a phone number and call someone.

I took my card file with me when I left, and for awhile, I continued to maintain it: glue stick, the individual filing cards in the system, culling people when they left their jobs, and so on.

At some point, I stopped actively maintaining the Rolodex. But I didn’t stop hanging onto the business cards. And now I have a bag full of them: nearly 20 years of contacts, from longtime bosses to people I met once (I literally have a binder clip of cards from my agency days with the title “PEOPLE I MET ONCE” on it) to all manner of my own cards from jobs past. And now I’m trying to figure out why.

This morning, I tried cleaning up the stash. I threw out a few dozen, but the vast majority are still here. Some names give me a flicker of remembrance, which is fun; some are entertaining, like the card from the woman whose bosses called her “Potato” and actually stuck it on her business card; others are former clients, prospects, or connections, people whose encounters with me made my life however much richer.

And still. It’s not like I’m talking to more than a few of these people, nor have I, some in literally decades. I found a handful of contacts I’m debating reaching out to anew, and a lot of cards that I’m keeping for keeping’s sake. I am slowly coming around to the fact that this is a bit ridiculous. But I haven’t thrown them out just yet.

Surely, some of my old business cards will be good for a good-old-days chuckle someday. The rest, though? Sooner or later, I’ll wish them all goodbye, their utility vastly improved by LinkedIn and Highrise, and their tenuous memories forever abandoned.

For now, though, Potato, I still have your card. Maybe I’ll give you a call.

My car is fourteen and one-half years old, give or take a few weeks. It has more than 142,000 miles on it.

I have since 2002 shared this car with my brother; when we bought it, we were both bachelors in Manhattan. These many years later, we still share it, transporting two families of four everywhere from Virginia to Maine, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts—and that was just in a one-month span earlier this summer.

The car drives younger than it is, thanks to an engine block replacement at 39,000 miles, and years of well-minded upkeep. Still, these last few months, the problems have been accumulating: a variety of leaks, vibrations, noises and odd smells that suggest the end is increasingly near.

It’s been a really good run, our time with this car. But it pales in comparison to the mainstay of the trunk: our father’s army blanket.

We have two such blankets, actually. They are remnants of Dad’s tenure in the Army Reserves in the late 1960s. Army green and heavy wool, with an unassuming “U.S.” on one side, they look and feel pretty much as you’d expect, and in true 20th-century American fashion, they were built to last.

For decades now, they’ve been part of our lives. I have distinct memories of the army blankets spread out on vacations and July Fourth fireworks displays as a kid. Nowadays they come in handy at the beach, and for the occasional picnic or event in the park. I’m not sure they’ve ever been washed in 50 years, but they’re so hardy, I suspect they don’t even need it.

Those uses suggest that the army blanket was often in the trunk of a car. So when I got my license as a teenager, I claimed one. It followed me to college, where it most memorably came in handy during a three-week deep freeze, where my car, literally iced into its parking space, finally found some traction with the blanket wedged between a rear tire and the compacted snow beneath.

From there, the army blanket took up more or less permanent residence in my car. For awhile, my brother and I each had a car, and a low-grade, three-way trunk tussle ensued between the two of us and our parents. “Do you have the army blanket?” “I need the blanket.” “Where’s the other blanket?”

We stumbled onto a perfect solution when we decided to share a car. Got the keys, figured out the stereo, threw the army blanket in the trunk, and away we went. We only use it a handful of times each year, but at this point, it just belongs there.

When our car finally goes, my brother and I are considering each getting our own. It’s time. Yet I’m going to miss sharing with him, for a host of reasons, including the efficiency of the situation (I don’t need a car full-time) and the many, many conversations that have started with the email subject, “Car.” And we’re going to have a heck of a time figuring out whose trunk gets blessed with our army blanket’s presence.

Update: We have new cars, and I have the army blanket tucked away in ours. (Thanks for not protesting, Jeff.) Also, I washed it. It smells clean.