The Archaeology Of A Tote Bag

I am a tote bag queen.
Somewhere among the years of folkdancing and travel and hauling things back and forth to school, I failed to acquire a pack mule and got roughly 2 dozen tote bags instead.  Some are huge, capable of holding a full-size pillow (or 4 petticoats for folkdancing), some are small -- only large enough for a book -- but most are medium-sized, and I have 3 from Lands' End that I use as purses.
The oldest of these 3 is in need of a good wash, so today I emptied it.
Oh my.
Besides the three mini-packs of tissues, numerous cough drop wrappers, a small screwdriver, hand sanitizer, and tickets to three separate plays (dating from 2010), I found eleven pens and pencils.  ELEVEN!!!
Obviously, this bag had been my companion to various academic games, and I must have dropped a pencil in every now and then just to be sure I had an extra.  Well, I have quite a few extras now!  Goodness!  They don't even all fit in the pencil holder on my desk.  I'll have to take them to school with me, as I go through a fair number of pencils (I still keep an old-fashioned gradebook, having learned that computer grading programs are likely to screw things up without notice, so my gradebook is the OFFICIAL copy if things go wrong elsewhere) and green pens (for grading) during the year.
(Okay, I KNOW some of you former students smiled when you saw the phrase "green pens," didn't you?)
Certainly, the evidence of this past dig has shown me that the washing for this bag is long overdue.  :)