Falling behind and catching up

When we were still actively homeschooling, we would have "ketchup" (or catsup, if you prefer) days. Those were days when we wouldn't try to accomplish anything so much as just catch up on things that were already in progress, books we wanted to read, recipes we wanted to try out, the daily business of living. And, of course, the laundry.

After falling behind last week, I figured it was time to catch up on the de-crapification process. And yesterday was a doozy.

But let me backtrack to last weekend for a moment....

Apparently it is allergy season here in Dodge, which may explain why I have been so tired lately. The Wizard has been tired as well, and even the young adults who flit in and out have been complaining about general tiredness. To combat this exhaustion, I have tried caffeine, which for me generally takes the form of tea. And with my tea, I sometimes like a cookie.

Lo and behold, somewhere amidst all the moving STUFF around, I found The Last Container of ginger snaps. These are probably my favorite store-bought cookies and this is THE Last Container. Wild Oats was bought out by Whole Foods not too long ago. Whole Foods continued every single brand of Wild Oats' store-brand cookies except the ginger snaps. So I'd been holding onto these, saving it for a special occasion.

I finally opened it and had a couple of cookies, then placed the container on the shelf near my desk so I could have some more the next day. However, late that evening I came to my desk to shut down the computer and found this on the floor nearby:

The dogs had eaten all of my cookies! I know it was the dogs because they are not really dogs, they are pigs. Cats would have nibbled a few, but very considerately left the rest. Or they would have moved them around the room, just as they do my yarn:

But the dogs will eat every crumb and then lick the container clean. My Very Last Wild Oats ginger snaps and they are all gone. I have no recourse but to bake some ginger snaps of my own. Fortunately, it is almost Purim, so I can make them and then give them away as mishloach manot. But more about that later.

In addition to eating my ginger snaps and relocating my yarn, the animals are helpful in many other ways. For example, they keep the laundry warm until it can be folded and put away.

Or sometimes they just guard it so that no passing cats (or dogs) can walk off with important articles. Guarding, naturally, requires a certain amount of stealth:

And it seems that at least one cat is concerned about whether we plan to purge kitties before the move:

Besides the allergy-tiredness syndrome and the disappointing loss of ginger snaps, the Drama Queen set back the de-crapification process by the simple expedient of moving to a new apartment. Because she was moving from a 2-bedroom apartment that she shared with a roommate and the roommate's significant other to an efficiency apartment that she is sharing only with a cat, she has less space at her disposal.

And when you have more than enough STUFF to fill the space you inhabit, the rest gets carted over to Mom's house, right?

Thus, we ended up with piles of the Drama Queen's belongings, like a shoe organizer and her brand-new vacuum cleaner (which I am assuming she plans to take back when she comes over to do her laundry):

And one of her two cat trees:

At least I have already re-homed the cat tree. It went home with a young friend yesterday, along with much more which I will describe in absorbing detail later on.

The Drama Queen also sent home her recycling:

And a couple of items of furniture that she had asked us to buy for her former apartment, like a small table and four chairs and a 6-foot bookshelf. I sent the table and bookshelf up to the bedroom that the Drama Queen herself used to inhabit, but the chairs haven't made it up yet for some reason:

I am a firm believer in letting sleeping cats lie, but I'm sure that has nothing to do with it.

On the other hand, the Drama Queen did take some of the odds and ends of kitchen stuff that were out in the garage.

Some were from her time in a student apartment on campus, and some were from the Sports Nut's time in a similar apartment on a different campus. Whatever. They will get some use, so all is well.

And, because the Drama Queen seems to collect change but never spend it, her brothers and I kept finding loose change in the cars she borrowed, in the stuff she left at the house to be laundered, and in the things she left here:

Long ago, when she was still living with us, we developed a protocol for dealing with the coins she left lying around. This protocol also applies to any other money that is discovered in a location that makes ownership unclear. It all goes into tzedakah boxes.

And here is my "pile" from last weekend. These are some pictures that had been in Grandmother's house or apartment. I'm going to offer them to one of my sisters first because she sort of has a southwestern thing going on in her place. If she -- or one of the other sibs -- doesn't want them, I guess they will be listed on Freecycle.

So I've caught up through the weekend. I'll deal with the post-weekend stuff in a bit. A word of warning -- it involves breaching the recesses of the dreaded Storage Locker.