Busy day with a happy ending

I'm going to tell about this day in sort-of reverse order, just because I can.

I didn't get around to my box, bag, shelf, or pile until the afternoon and it was getting kind of late, so I started with this box:

That was almost too easy. I had Freecycled a bag of bubble wrap and worms over the weekend, and it hadn't been picked up yet, so I just dumped these worms into the bag and recycled the cardboard box.

Definitely not challenging enough, so I went back out to the garage and pulled down this box, which I thought was labeled correctly:


Quilt tops, huh? Made by my grandmother, no doubt, and relegated to my house when we cleared out my mother's house. With a few items thrown on top, of course.

But when I removed the top few items and disposed of them properly (Freecyle, in this case), this is what I found:


Definitely not quilt tops. Here's where the brutal honestly comes in -- this box of STUFF seems to date mostly from our trip across the country to live here in Dodge. Over 5 years ago. There were the amusing devices we used to communicate with one another:

Maps, animal tranquilizers, and a pile of collars and leashes -- one for each cat who made the trip (except for Future Vet's cat, whose collar is probably somewhere among his boxes).


Since the name tags we special-ordered for that trip all had a cell phone number that we gave up five years ago, the collars all went into the trash. I saved the leashes in case we need them for our next move. If we don't, I can always Freecycle them on the way out of Dodge.

That box, too, took a surprisingly small amount of time, so I foolishly went and got another box, only to find that it was full of PICTURES!


Studio portraits, school pictures, snapshots, books full of baby pictures, old family photos.... You would think we wanted to remember what our kids looked like when they were growing up. Plus there was a whole pile of small unframed art work.

But the most interesting find in the box of pictures was this:


Ack! Floppy disks containing yet more pictures. (Though why we call them "floppy" when they are as rigid as hard plastic is beyond me.) Fortunately, I have a Wizard on call. He took the old disk drives upstairs and brought back their contents on a flash drive. Whew!

Then at the very bottom of the box, I unearthed all the refrigerator photos from our last house. That was kind of fun:


I don't know whether I'm going to put them all up on our current refrigerator, however. Maybe I will do it right before Future Vet comes home in May, just to see if he notices.

I really couldn't deal with all the photos tonight, so I dumped them back in the box for another day. (That's TWO boxes of photos that I have put off now, just in case you forgot to count.)

So, to assuage the guilt from not completing that task, I found a box full of travel containers and offered them to my Freecycle acquaintance who works at a homeless shelter:


She is coming by tomorrow morning for some stuff anyway, so this is lagniappe.

Also, I virtuously washed clothes and bed things that are going to be picked up by a charitable organization on Thursday. I didn't finish the pile, but it is at least diminished.


Hershey keeps us all honest. He checks the pile regularly and lets me know if the cats are in it.

I also spent some time today finishing up that pile of CDs that I wanted on iTunes. And I converted not one, but TWO, cassette tapes ("Anything Goes" and "My Fair Lady") to mp3 format.

And here's what I did this morning, so that I didn't get to de-crapifying until the afternoon. I went to the Apple store -- that is, I remembered my appointment to get my iPod fixed.

The problem was that I could play things just fine so long as I had a power source -- like the speakers or a plug in the car. But it wouldn't work off the battery alone and my computer wouldn't recognize it so that I could restore it. The guy at the Apple store took a look, plugged it in and told me the battery was gone.

Uh-oh, I wondered, how much does a new battery cost? Then he tells me that this iPod, which the Wizard bought me for our anniversary last year, had ONE WEEK left on its warranty, so he would just give me a new one. Thank goodness the Wizard remembers to send in registration cards!

So here's my brand-new iPod, just waiting to get plugged in and loaded up with all those nicely cleaned-up iTunes files:


Not a bad day, all in all. A brand-new iPod and I emptied TWO boxes (even if one was only worms).