The Sentimental Scientist

The geniuses that designed our building optimized teaching and office space but literally designed the building without any storage space. While we have become quite adept at finding and using microstorage "hide in plain sight" spaces it just seems that the labs especially are an avalanche waiting to happen.

So, I have been on one of my periodic purges (no irony intended). And at the bottom and back of a desk drawer we use as a spectrometer table for the teaching IR I found this collection of objects:

What we have here is the high school chemistry text that I used in grade 11 and 12. The safety glasses that I wore through graduate school and the last CNDO/2 program that I ran with punched cards (it was an optimization of the torsion angle in the dithionite dianion).

Sentimental fool that I am I have kept these incidental objects, the flotsam and jetsam of a life in science, for decades for no other reason than the tactile joy and nostalgia they bring to me. They went back into the drawer but really, am I alone in doing this? Should I just grow up and move on? Does anyone else have an irrational scientific memory drawer? What is in it?

Have a good week people, play safe.