Well, it's happened again. I broke one of my cardinal rules and now I'm paying the price. Or at least I'll have to if I want these speakers to work.

My cardinal rule is this: Never Get Rid Of Anything. I save all kinds of things against the day when someone will suddenly have a good use for them. Our attic holds old toys that are just hanging around for grandkids to discover, picnic baskets and styrofoam coolers that haven't held food in ages, boxes full of books I've read, books I may read someday and books that I bought because they looked interesting at the time. There's a perfectly good HO train set for which I'll build a fantastic layout in the spare bedroom, if I can find another place to store the unused exercise equipment, cabinets full of old clothes and furniture that's too good to discard and the kids may need someday. If it's true that one man's trash is another man's treasure, I am either King Midas or Fred Sanford.

I like to think my saving habit is a thrifty and environmentally sound one, and not just a sign of an obsessive-compulsive disorder. I find new uses for perfectly-good parts of things that have otherwise hit the end of their useful lives and I reuse items that have outlasted their original use. And by loading up the unused rooms in my house, I'm filling space that I'd otherwise burn fossil fuel to heat and saving landfill room for others.

A shoe box is a simple example of an item with more than one use. Imagine that Christmas is coming and I need to wrap up a teddy bear for my three-year-old niece. I could go to the local big-box store and buy expensive and tastefully-textured gift boxes at a time when I've already stretched the budget as tight as a snare-drum head. Or I can walk to the closet, pull out a box that once held my new walking shoes and toss the bear in that. Either box will be wrapped in Christmas paper before it travels to the family gathering. The paper and the box will be flung aside when the tot discovers the teddy bear, and I'll have not only trod gently on old Mother Earth, but I'll have three bucks to boot. Now, at this point a word of caution is due. If you try this yourself, be careful about recycling boxes when the kid is old enough to read. You won't be remembered sweetly if your teenaged nephew finds a box labeled "Play Station 3" stuffed with practical gifts like socks and underwear...unless your nephews are very different from mine.

Those plastic fruit cups are prime candidates for imaginative reuse. They nest nicely in a kitchen drawer and can hold lots of things that aren't fruit. Mints, candies, nuts, bolts and screws all fit neatly in them. They make dandy little Jello molds and they hold enough ice cream to satisfy me for a good fifteen minutes. If next year's Miss Relay costume requires falsies, a couple of strategically-placed fruit cups and a few strips of bandage tape should give me that extra touch of feminine allure.

So, how did I mess up my little system? I did it by an act of goodwill. This spring our Relay For Life team held a fundraising yard sale. We all donated some of our excess items. A few of the things that people brought actually were good bargains. I pitched in a couple of sweaters, some gently-read coffee-table books and a box full of old AC adapters, figuring that someone would be overjoyed to find a working 3VDC power supply with the funny tip, the one that would bring their long-dormant electronic gizmo back to life. I worked the sale for a while and when relief came I left to run errands. When I returned to help take things down I saw that the team had been super-efficient. Our sale site was cleared out and any unsold merchandise was gone.

I looked around the piled folding tables and neatly-boxed tent poles. "Where's that orange shoe box of power supplies?" I asked one of the ladies. "With everything else we didn't sell," she replied. "At Goodwill."

I rushed to the local Goodwill store. Too late, I saw the orange box, along with a familiar sweater and a coffee-table book about owls, parked in the donation bin. A large sign posted nearby warned in capital letters that once an item was in the bin it was theirs, and people who removed such items...well, they wouldn't receive any good will. A closed-circuit TV camera glowered, its red light menacing, from a bracket on the wall above. I returned home beaten, but still optimistic. At least I had an empty drawer in which I could start a new power-supply collection. I promptly forgot them and moved on with life.

Then came the new laptop. At least, it's new to me. I picked it up at a yard sale for $20 (and hopefully the lady's husband isn't asking, "Honey, where's that old Dell...Oh, you didn't! Dang, I was saving that for the kids!"). I wanted to try out all the features so I dug out an old dot-matrix printer and some speakers. The printer works great but the speakers need...say it with me...an AC adapter! I hurried to the drawer and rummaged through my new collection. I didn't rummage long; there was only one, and it's the wrong voltage. I wouldn't feel badly except that I'm not sure that both speakers work. That leaves me with a conundrum: What if I buy a new power supply and one speaker's dead? I guess the answer's obvious: I'll put the stupid thing in the drawer, because sooner or later someone will have a dead gadget that will need it!