Announcing -- What is it? Wednesdays

I keep coming across strange and wonderful items that make me wonder why we held onto them because I can imagine no earthly function for them. So once a week, I am going to post a picture of the weirdest thing we uncover during the week. Maybe others will be able to figure out what-it-is and why-we-kept-it better than I can.

Although today is Wednesday, I do not have a what-is-it tonight. Instead I have a who-is-it. Actually, I know who is in this picture, and at least two of the people who read this blog on a regular basis should also know. But finding this picture was kind of strange and wonderful:

The Drama Queen, who has 25 boxes of her own to sort through, decided that one particular box was not full of her stuff as we had thought. Instead it was mostly full of old clothes of an indeterminate nature, which had apparently at some point been used as a cat bed. So I told her to just dump the contents of the box into a trash bag.

As the dumping was going on, we realized that there were non-clothing objects in the bag. There was a very nice vase, a Nambe bowl, and that picture. Still an odd assortment of items.

I got through four of my own boxes today, as evidenced by the number tags I removed from the boxes:

Lots of mysteries by women writers -- Ngaio Marsh, Ruth Rendell, Jane Langton, Josephine Tey, Martha Grimes -- so that was pretty cool. And lots of science fiction, some of which I haven't read yet. And -- even cooler, in some ways -- plenty of books that we probably won't care to move, so they can find new homes before we leave Dodge.

There are several (okay, 5 or 6) boxes of books that we have no further use for, plus a couple more that everyone in the house needs to go through to make sure that they don't want to keep something that I'm not interested in. And one box that is chock-full of Games Magazines and their erstwhile companion publication The Four-Star Puzzler. We subscribed to this magazine for years and only recently came to the realization that there wasn't much point in continuing to subscribe because we have more unfinished puzzles in the magazines already in the house than we will ever have time to solve. And this box was the proof -- I didn't count, but my guess is that there is a decade's worth of Games, plus the entire 4- or 5- year run of the Puzzler in that box.

I put it aside to think about on another day.

I didn't get much knitting done today because Sports Nut wanted to watch football bowl games. I usually knit while watching TV and I didn't want to watch football, so there you go. I worked some more on the pouch for the Wallaby:

Because I am really not the type to bring in the New Year with a loud party, tomorrow is going to be a movie marathon and finger-food day. I should have plenty of time to knit.

Closing in on the end of the year

This is going to be brief because it is already tomorrow. I seem to have been busy all day, but I'm not sure what I really accomplished. The box update:

Twenty-four boxes of books in the hall, twenty-four boxes of books.... Assuming that I can subtract 24 from 28 correctly, that means we took 4 boxes down today and looked through them. There are 3 empty boxes in the dining room, so I guess that means I made some progress. However, there are various piles of books around, including these on the kitchen counter:

These are all books we will most likely hang on to. In the middle pile in front, under "The Hobbit" are two complete sets of "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy by Tolkien. One was the Wizard's before we met and the other was mine. The offspring and I were talking today. Turns out that each of them has their own personal set of these books. I wonder what that says about this family .... but not for long.

There is also an almost-complete set of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe mysteries and quite a lot of Stephen King, along with an assortment of beloved children's books.In the various discard piles are many more children's books, some of which were also beloved -- but I have to draw the line somewhere.

You may recall that the Drama Queen has five days in a row off from work and that she had 25 boxes sitting in the hall waiting for her to go through them. Today was her second day off and here's the box situation in her hall:

That is only the first pile that she has tackled -- and only 3 boxes are gone from the pile. So, by my calculations, that means 22 boxes are still in the hall. And she only has 3 days left. I'm not exactly sure what will happen at the end of those 3 days, but we need that hallway to be navigable.

As I mentioned before, it is already tomorrow, but here's what is going on in our dining room right now:

They don't go to bed! They come home and stay up all night Skype-ing and AIM-ing and FaceBook-ing and stuff like that. I suppose if we didn't provide computers for them, they wouldn't be able to do all those things. Without computers, they would be forced to stay up late at night reading, just like I had to do.

Last, but not least, the large Wallaby sweater is progressing. I was tooling along when I suddenly remembered that there was a pouch that needed to be knitted before reaching a certain point. So I took a break from knitting the body and started the pouch, which follows the same rainbow-striped pattern:

And now to bed. Tomorrow the Visiting Cousin catches a plane and heads home. I'd better get at least some sleep before taking him to the airport in the morning.

Wintertime and the Livin' is Cold

Actually, it's been colder. I'm just really tired, but I want to post something tonight so that I can check "update blog" off my to-do list. The dogs have been thrown out because one of them was chasing cats. I'm sure that any minute now they are going to start telling me that it's cold and dark outside. To top it off, I don't feel so good ... didn't even eat supper tonight. I'll probably wake up in the middle of the night and be ravenous, but all that is in the future.

Today, I went with Future Vet and the Visiting Cousin down to Old Town where we did not visit the Rattlesnake Museum. We skipped it today because the Visiting Cousin is going to be in Dodge again over the summer and will have a chance to go at that time. If you are ever in Dodge, however, it's really an interesting place to visit as long as your parents and teachers didn't mistakenly fill your heads with nonsense about snakes and bugs and stuff like that.

While in Old Town, we picked up a few odds and ends and encountered this interesting sewer cover:

Seeing this led to speculation about whether the city had replaced all of the sewer covers three years ago and, if so, how much the enterprise cost. We were happy to see that the iron work was done in the USA, providing jobs for American workers. But we did wonder whether the city will have to make new ones in 97 years for the Quadricentennial.

We also admired this mosaic wall, which was still being created the last time that the Visiting Cousin came to town:

I'm afraid that picture doesn't do it justice. It really is a work of art.

I went through one box of books today. Most are keepers, but a few were not for various reasons. And I have a small pile of books for the Wizard to take a look at when he returns. I would have done more, but (as mentioned before) I really wasn't feeling well.

I took my feeling unwellness over to the family room and wrapped up in a down comforter and knitted while watching (and occasionally sleeping through) television shows. Despite the frequent naps, I did make some progress on the Wallaby sweater:

And that's it for tonight. As prophesied, the dogs are whining and pawing at the door in an attempt to convince me that it is too cold and dark to be outside.

Late Night Update

We got through more boxes during the day:

Wow.... five more boxes. Another of homeschooling texts (US and world history this time), one full of papers that were duly filed or recycled, one full of books that nobody wants (user manuals I wrote for a product I worked on in 1979?), another of paperbacks -- mostly science fiction, and one of books we need to think about whether we want to keep. All in all, a good day's work.

Plus it was Media Guy's birthday today! I made a cake and there were some presents, but nobody could find any candles:

I think he was pleased with the haul.

Then later in the evening, Future Vet and his cousin decided to watch a movie, so I managed to finish the ribbing at the bottom of the Wallaby and to make the increases to start the body of the sweater.

Ribbing is slow work for me, so I'm hopeful that things will speed up after this.

Ruminations on Books ... and Boxes

I love books. I love seeing them on the shelf, holding them in my hands, reading them, finishing them, reading them again to encounter them in a new way.... there's basically nothing about books that I don't love. Years ago, I ordered something from the Gaylord library supply company and received their catalog with my order. As I perused the catalog, wanting to buy at least one of everything in it, I realized that I didn't really want a house. I wanted a library!

Nevertheless, our current house doesn't offer much in the way of wall space against which to place bookshelves, nor open space in which we can put freestanding bookshelves. Therefore, many of our books have been in boxes ever since we moved to Dodge. They move in and out of the boxes, depending on what books we want to access in any given day or week, but they have still been in boxes.

The boxes have also migrated -- from a bedroom to the office to another bedroom to the dining room to the family room, upstairs, downstairs, in my lady's chamber.... and eventually to the storage locker, which was close enough that we could still shuffle books in and out of boxes at our whim. But now the boxes are back in the house where the books belong.

I happened to mention to a group of online friends that we had moved these 200 or so boxes back into the house and that I was going through them, and I said that I would be "tossing, freecycling, filing, shelving, or putting away the contents. I know there are a number of books from our homeschooling days that I can pass along to families with younger children. Or I might see what we can get over at the used book store for some of the books we won't use and my friends don't want. I'll be glad to have my fiction and reference books readily available again, however."

This remark caused a storm of comment, mostly from people who thought I should just rid of all the books (donating them to the library, who would probably just sell them), that I shouldn't bother putting up bookcases because when we sell this house some people might be turned off by the sight of all those books, that if I had already read a book that there was no point in keeping it, that books weren't worth the cost of moving them, and so on. 

One person said there's no point in owning books because you can just get them at the library! I don't know what library that person goes to, but I do know that the vast majority of the books we own are not in the library collection here in Dodge. Not in a lot of other places, either.


Don't get me wrong. I love libraries. Even here in Dodge, which has a somewhat unsatisfactory library collection, I am at the library at least once a week. I usually have between 5 and 15 books checked out of the library at any given time. Libraries are great. For some things. My experience has been that libraries are relatively good at having recent fiction (published within the last 20 years) and "classic" fiction. They are less likely to have in circulation fiction that is more than 15-20 years old, even if the author is still actively writing and publishing books. Libraries also have to make room for new books.


In terms of non-fiction.... well, we have a couple of special collections that our local library cannot rival. And we use a lot of our non-fiction for reference on a regular basis. 


So I asked this group if anyone else re-read fiction or kept books for reference. There was mostly silence. Well, one person collects cookbooks -- but they are weeded out on a regular basis because there is only so much room on the bookshelf.


Finally one person said this, which sums up my attitude very nicely: "...we have thousands of books [because] they form parts of our lives and interests and yes, we reread, we savour, we review."

With all that as prelude, I can now tell you that I have started going through the boxes that were in the front hall. Friday's magic number:

33! Since we started with 37, that means 4 boxes sorted through. One contained math textbooks from our homeschooling days, so I set that aside to see if any homeschoolers I know are interested. One was full of youth group stuff (thought I had already gotten rid of all that) that ended up mostly in the recycle bag. One box had canceled checks and check registers from our bank account back in the town we lived in 6 years ago  before moving to Dodge. Definitely in the shred pile. There was also a large storage box full of photographs, which the offspring and I spent time going through in great detail.


My find in the photo box was proof that boxes of books are not new in my life. These pictures were taken in my second apartment -- about a year after I left college and got a real job:

The cats were my very first pair of cats -- Francesca (the calico) and Ragtime (the black and white Sleeping Beauty). From the empty bookcase in the background, I surmise that I was just moving in so I had some excuse for boxes of books. However, I also note that some of the boxes are standing on their sides with book spines facing out. My guess is that those were "supplementary" book cases.


I probably still have most of those books, but I miss Ragtime and Francesca. They were great cats.


So of the first four boxes, one was definitely keeper books, mostly paperback science fiction by some of my favorite writers. One was homeschooling books that will be passed along. A third box's contents was mostly papers that have been recycled. And the fourth had stuff to shred and old family photographs, which are now located with others of their kind.


My offspring grabbed a few photos that they wanted for their personal collections. I scanned them in before relinquishing them. Here's one:

That is my daughter the Drama Queen and one of her friends in a ride at Old Orchard Beach in Maine. I couldn't find the picture from this trip that I really wanted -- of an 18-month-old Sports Nut trying to climb out of the ferris wheel while we were at the top of the ride.


In other news from before the weekend -- the Wizard finally was home long enough to put in the new fireplace screen. The old fireplace screen has been missing a panel since before we bought this house. We kind of lived with it -- and blocked the fireplace opening in the winter with piles of boxes, which were never in short supply. The new screen looks really nice:

Unfortunately, it's just a tad smaller than the old screen. I'm going to take some rags and water and clean up all that soot any day now.


And finally, a knitting update. I finally was able to cast on for the Wallaby sweater for the older sister. I then had to rip it all out and start again because I got the stitches twisted, but at least I started. As of Friday:

And that's it from before the weekend. The offspring have a cousin visiting from Boston and the Wizard is on his way out of town again, so this promises to be a busy week. But I will continue to post updates on box progress.

My New Project Moves Into the House

I'll admit that I've been sloughing off a little, mostly in favor of knitting and watching DVDs. However, yesterday I enlisted the help of Media Guy and Sports Nuts and created a Whole New Project for myself. Here's the first part:

That is a pile of 37 boxes of (mostly) books from our storage locker. I put numbers on them so I could keep track of my progress. Let's face it, daily photos of a pile of banker's boxes, diminishing or not, is not that entertaining.

The boxes are there because the rental on our storage locker, as I mentioned previously, went up beyond my willingness to pay. The new New Shed we bought with the intention of using it to hold the contents of the storage locker ... well, we have had a few problems in the construction.

We went to the locker and took a look:

and foolishly figured that we could probably fit all of that into the garage. We came home and cleared some space in the garage:

And then we shlepped boxes. We found that we could fit between 51 and 55 boxes in the back of a Grand Caravan with the seats removed and still see out the back:

A slightly smaller number of boxes could fit into the other car we drove over there:

Yes, I did make Sports Nut (in foreground looking through the contents of the box he is carrying) and Media Guy (background) do almost all of the lifting and carrying. But I supervised and took pictures, as well as driving the van to and from the storage locker 4 times, so I did my part.

The end result? Bye-bye to Locker B19:

And hello to a garage just chock full of boxes once again:

I think we did a pretty good job of leaving room to walk around so that we can get to the dog feeding table, the pantry shelves, the recycling bins, the freezer, etc.

But lest anyone think that these piles of boxes in the garage and the pile of numbered boxes in the front hall was the sum total of the boxes..... Let me show you the pile that the Drama Queen's brothers made for her in the hall outside her bedroom:

You can't really tell from this angle, but there are four piles of six boxes each, plus another odd box just outside her door. That's 25 boxes for the Drama Queen to go through and to somehow fit into her bedroom. You remember her bedroom, don't you? I posted a picture just the other day.

In knitting news, the Drama Queen has made some dramatic (what else?) progress on her Dr. Who scarf:

And I have finished the much less complicated scarf that I knit for Sports Nut:

Okay, as usual, I still have a few yarn ends to weave in, but Sports Nut was available during half time of the basketball game he is watching and I thought I'd better get a picture while the getting was good.

The Experiment Ends and Other Things Begin

The guest room experiment is officially over! Here's the final result, as of this morning:

Day #18 -- Thursday, December 17, 2009

And here's what the same room looks like as of about 10 minutes ago:

Yes, the boys young men are back in town. I should have known by the pile of towels in the laundry room and the luggage in the hallway:

And now. Finally. At last!! I can reveal the reason for the guest room experiment. Here it is:

That, dear friends and gentle readers, is the other room occupied by the Drama Queen. Her brothers were of the opinion that she wouldn't be able to keep the guest room/sitting room clear as well, so they requested daily photographs. Unfortunately, once she twigged to the fact that I was taking pictures every day, she kept the second room relatively clear.

Now that I've finished the first Wallaby, I was going to start on the body for the second one today. However, Sports Nut asked me to make a scarf for him first. I got a bit done this evening while watching Angel with a Thesulac demon (Season 2, Episode 2) and then Angels and Demons. The viewing lent the evening an interesting symmetry.

Sports Nut's scarf to date:

And that's it. The Wizard just called from the airport. Everyone is back in Dodge, for a few days at least.

One More Day -- and a Wallaby is Delivered

Everyone is done with the final exams for this semester and all we have to do is wait for Media Guy and Future Vet to drive home from one state and for the Wizard to fly back from a different state. Then we will all be in one place for the last night of Hanukka!

Day #17 -- Wednesday, December 16, 2009 -- Two Views Today

View #1 shows the infamous futon couch, complete with knittin and cat. Also A TV tray with dirty dishes.

In View #2, the floor looks clean ... at first. A closer look reveals potato chips all over the floor. It looks like I have some work to do before Media Guys gets back tomorrow night.

And the smaller Wallaby was finally delivered! I finished the knitting part a week ago, but the ends needed to be woven in, I had some personal obligations, and I just didn't see the small child for whom this was made. Today there was a confluence of the planets or something,

So far, so good. It took about 2 weeks to make and this child can probably wear it through the rest of the winter. After that, she'll have to wait for her big sister's Wallaby to be knitted and for her big sister to outgrow it.

The Experiment Draws to a Close

Just two more days after this and the guest room experiment will be at an end. Media Guy and Future Vet will be home for winter break and I won't be doing this any more.

Well, maybe from time to time as a surprise.

Day #16 -- Tuesday, December 15, 2009

The Drama Queen has cleaned up the little piles of stuff, but the couch -- whose picture didn't come out, for some reason -- has a lot more stuff on it, including a couple of containers that are supposed to be returned to the kitchen.

In other news, I finished the Wallaby sweater tonight, but didn't take a picture. With any luck, I can take a picture with a live model tomorrow.

This, then to bed

This is another very quick update, exploring only the issue of the "guest" room. Today I attended the funeral of Joe Siegel, a very dear friend. Last Thursday, Joe was sitting up in bed and talking. By Sunday morning he was gone. When we talked last week, Joe said to me, "I thought we would have more time." He was talking about time with his wife of 16 years; a match truly made in Heaven. But I feel that Joe's words resonate for me and everyone who knew and loved Joe as well. We thought we would have more time.

Take the time to tell the people you love that they are important to you. You really don't know whether you are going to have all the time you think you will have.

Day #15 -- Monday, December 14, 2009

The little piles on the floor have not gone away. Neither has the cat who is responsible for them.

No knitting to report. Between editing final papers for Future Vet and helping my friend as she transitions to the next stage of her life, the part without Joe by her side, I had neither time nor the inclination to knit.

Too Tired to Think

I know I haven't updated this in a couple of days. Life -- and death -- intruded. Sometimes the needs of the people we see every day in real life take precedence.

Nevertheless, we have updates!

I only have pictures of the guest room over 3 of the last 4 days.

Day #12 -- Thursday, December 10

The Dr. Who scarf progresses. The amount of yarn on the floor ... stays about the same.

Day #13 -- Friday, December 11

Still stuff on the floor -- including a spot over to the left that spells "cat throwup" to me and a little pile toward the back that spells something entirely different, but also cat-related, to me.

Day #14 -- Sunday December 13

Hmmmm...... the number of piles has multiplied. And the culprit sits on the couch.

The knitting also progressed for a few days before hitting a brick wall over the weekend. At the end of the day on Thursday, all the knitting was complete:

By Friday evening, I was finished with the smaller of the two Wallabys!

Or was I?

And this, my friends, is why I am resisting making more striped Wallabys. All those ends to weave in.

I wish I could report that I've finished the finishing tasks, but I simply haven't had time. I'm not too sure about this coming week either, in terms of time to knit, but I will get back to it very soon.

Very short update

Only two things to report. First of all, now that the Drama Queen knows that I am taking pictures of her "sitting" room (our guest room) every day, she is keeping the room neat(er). Whether that is a positive or negative aspect of the experiment remains to be seen.

Day #11 -- Wednesday, December 9, 2009

There's also a case of water over on the small refrigerator, but then again -- where else would it go?

Second item, progress on the smaller wallaby sweater I am making. It's coming right along, even though I didn't get all that much knitting time today:

What remains to be done: the hood, the seams under the arms, and weaving in all those loose ends of yarn.

Snow again -- and Day #10

I went to sleep last night listening to the wind howling. I woke up around 5:00 a.m. to the sound of thunder and the flash of lightning. I got up and let the dogs out quickly, then got them settled inside just in time for the storm to hit. More thunder, more lightning ... and then hail and sleet and snow. It all stopped less than an hour later, but 2 to 3 inches snow had fallen in that relatively short period. It looked kind of pretty:

It was still fairly nice looking once the sun came up.

I had to take that picture really quickly, because I hadn't let the dogs out again. Once they spent a few minutes frolicking in the snow, it looked like this:

A variety of things went on today that siderailed my get-out-of-Dodge efforts, so I didn't get back to the file cabinets today. But, I did manage to work on the sweater I am knitting for my 2-year-old friend:

And, the grand finale -- Day #10 of the Great Experiment, Tuesday, December 8, 2009:

Once again, I decided to take a picture of the futon couch, because that is still the epicenter of all activity in this room.