The Work Continues

I made further progress with the Great Box Reduction Project today, though not quite the progress I had intended. There was a pile of about 6 boxes that were supposed to go out to the New Shed (you remember the New Shed, don't you?), but it was raining all day.

Rain is relatively rare here in Dodge, so I chose not to track mud all over the house while taking boxes out. Instead, I let the dogs do all the mud-tracking. And they did it with enthusiasm.

I did sort through some more boxes today, partly because the Drama Queen was looking for something and there was a faint possibilty that it was in one of the boxes in my bedroom. No luck with that, but the pile is somewhat reduced, as you can see:

I also carried 14 empty banker's boxes downstairs. Actually, I threw them down the stairs, but since they are inanimate objects there were no complaints. Unlike the time I threw one of the cats UP the stairs. By her tail.

But that's another story.

So here's where the empty boxes were. More of the floor is visible now:

And though it may not look like it, I carried four boxes of papers down the stairs so that I could go through them while watching the first season of Stargate Atlantis on DVD. I only finished going through two of the four boxes, but that's okay because there is still a lot of Stargate Atlantis to see. Quite a lot of the contents of the first box were of the "whyever did we keep these?" variety -- receipts, empty envelopes, and bills from around the time of our move to Dodge 6 years ago. But there were also some things I really should file, like the booklets that came with all our appliances.

The contents of the second box were mostly papers and other things from the 5 years that I worked with the youth group at my synagogue. I gave that up last year because I was frustrated by the lack of support from the synagogue, the community, and the parents. This was not an easy box to go through because I still have some bad feelings about the whole situation. In the end, I decided to recycle the vast majority of the papers and officer manuals and flyers and other stuff because, honestly, I don't think there is any point in saving them against the possibility of the youth group reviving. So my two overflowing boxes of papers sorted down to this:

The box in front is the few youth group things that I am sending back to the synagogue -- a havdallah set and some financial records. The other box is about half unused papers and folders and things and the other half is those appliance manuals and a few receipts for work we had done on this house. I won't inflict on you a picture of the bag of papers waiting to be recycled.

In other news, I managed not to clutter up the balcony today:

Of course, it was raining most of the day (that's why the rug is wet) so it really wasn't worth going out there anyway.

This is Progress! No, Really!!

Today I sorted those boxes that I discovered in my bedroom.

Look how much progress I made!

What? You aren't impressed? Well, take a look in the other direction:

This still doesn't look like progress to you? Sheesh!

Okay, what we have here is piles of boxes. There's a pile of boxes that have  books in them, a BIG pile of empty boxes (that's good, right?), a pile of boxes that have papers and office supplies in them, a pile of boxes with yarn, a pile of boxes of papers that I need to go through one  by one.

Unfortunately, that first picture is of a pile of boxes that I still have to go through. But this is the way I work -- divide and (with luck) conquer. Tomorrow I will start getting those boxes out, or empty, or whatever it is I need to do with them. And then, of course, I get to sort through the rest of the boxes.

On the other hand, I think you would agree that the balcony looks much better tonight:

I even sat out there for a while this afternoon and enjoyed the view. There's still a lot of cleaning to do, but at least I got rid of all those boxes left behind by the guys who worked on the bathroom.

What's that? What happened to all those boxes and other junk? Well, I threw them down the stairs:

When I tossed them down, I thought they were just empty boxes with a little packing material. I didn't realize there was a lot of other debris from the bathroom work -- things like washers and screws and a drainpipe. So there was a little more cleanup at the foot of the stairs than I had anticipated.

But here's the result -- a box full of cardboard to take to the recycling center and a bag of trash to take to the trashcan:

Not too bad for the first day's work. And I have 3 more days before the Wizard gets home.

Time to Face the Music

All summer long (yeah, I know - summer ended over a month ago), we worked on the house. I know a lot of things didn't get detailed here because of broken ribs, and general craziness, but we did do a lot of things. We completed work on all three of our bathrooms, we painted bedrooms and moved young people around, we got two young men off to college, we grew things and pulled weeds. And so on and so forth.

Apparently I also did a lot of sleep-walking. Because my ribs and my re-injured knee hurt so much for so long, I generally came downstairs in the morning and stayed downstairs all day long. I only went up to my bedroom to go to sleep. But.... well, I took a good look at my bedroom (the corner where the bed and the dressers do not reside) today.

Sometime over the summer while I wasn't paying attention, the box fairies came and piled up boxes in my bedroom. (That's a cat down in the lower right corner, in case you are wondering. Her name is LSB and she's kind of annoying.)

Someone also did a number on the balcony outside my bedroom:

 My mission this week is to do something about all of that. I don't know what, exactly, but something.

I will post pictures of these two areas every day this week. Even if the lack of progress is embarrassing.

De Profundis -- Out of the Depths

This post isn't, strictly speaking, about getting out of Dodge. But I ran across this in the process of looking at html files as I move our family web site from its (formerly free) space on Geocities to our new wholly-owned domain. (There's not much there yet, but it should be populated within a week. I need the Wizard to help me figure out how to set up sub-directories for our new space, and he's working out of town this week.)

Anyway, I came across a tale about cleaning out the basement in our previous house. There are no pictures, but parts of the story are pretty discouraging. It really sounds like we haven't made much progress since 1997.

The Grim Truth:
We moved into this house almost 10 years ago, put everything we didn't need immediately into the basement, promptly had two babies, and basically haven't been into the basement (except to change the cat boxes and to put in more we-don't-need-it-now stuff) ever since. Until July 4, 1997, that is. Armed with latex gloves, a broom, and 4 kids, we ventured into the depths.

Do you have any idea how many empty cardboard boxes a family of six can accumulate in 10 years? There were food cartons (we buy in bulk through a food coop), computer cartons (did we really buy four computers?), and cartons from things we don't even own any more. And did you know that the town manager for the Girl Scout cookie sale is allowed to keep all the empty GS cookie cartons?

The most amazing thing about the number of boxes we found is that we are avid recyclers. Every other week when the recycling truck comes by, we have three or four times as much to recycle as we have to throw away. How did we miss so many cardboard boxes? Was there a secret cardboard box breeding program going on in our basement? Maybe everyone in town was coming by and leaving their cardboard boxes in the basement while we were out. Come to think of it, that might account for some of the boxes we found....

Then there are all the toys that nobody (trust me) in this house is ever going to play with again. Yet, when I pulled out the old Johnson&Johnson rattle with the red and white cardboard tube and the blue balls,

my 7-year-old son [the future Future Vet] thought that was the neatest thing he had ever seen in his life! It almost took an act of Congress to get it away from him. It's amazing how every toy that a kid ever threw down in disgust becomes an instant favorite once it has spent a few years mildewing in the basement.

Speaking of mildew, did I mention the water problems we had in the basement? Not only have we had occasional seepage, causing us to put almost everything up on concrete blocks to keep it dry, we've had a couple of bona fide basement floods over the years. We really thought we'd removed everything that had been damaged by water as the damage occurred. Guess again!

We began by pulling everything out and strewing it about the back yard. Obvious trash we put into a pile. Less obvious trash we sorted into general categories like "why ever did we keep this", "throw away while the kids aren't looking", "could be sold at a yard sale but why bother", etc.

The end of the story:
That is apparently all I had time to write back in 1997. We moved out of that house 6 years later and, if I recall correctly, we gave away lots and lots of STUFF (like all of our bookshelves and the dining room set and the piano and some beds), and still ended up having someone haul away a couple of truck-loads of STUFF from the basement.

Well, we had had six more years to accumulate things, after all.

As promised, a post on Sunday

The Wizard and I just got back from a weekend away from Dodge, so there is really nothing new that has happened in terms of de-crapifying. However, over the summer while I was recovering from breaking ribs and tearing knee ligaments as well as helping Media Guy and Future Vet get ready to move out and the Drama Queen ready to move back in, we worked on the Old Shed. Which should never be confused with the New Shed.

This is the Old Shed. The door is cracked a bit and sometime in the past someone apparently experimented on it with paint. The New Shed is just to the right of the Old Shed, but more on that at a later date.

As can be expected when doing any kind of de-crapification around here, the Old Shed was filled with an interesting array of STUFF, including lots of cardboard boxes, which we collapsed and stuffed into other boxes so that we could carry them all off to recycling:

 Don't ask why we don't just do that as we empty the boxes in the first place. I don't KNOW!!

We also took out our bicycles, which were buried under the boxes and other STUFF. Burial by box makes bicycles bothersome to bike on. (Say that five times fast!)

We found the carcasses of two of my Grandmother's green chairs, and therein lies a tale:

My great-grandmother, Eugenia Key Cagle, started housekeeping with these chairs sometime before 1899, which was the year that her oldest daughter, my Grandmother, was born. Many years later, when my great-grandmother was moving in with her youngest daughter (my Aunt Kat) for the last few years of her life, she was concerned about her chairs. My great-aunt already had a houseful of furniture and didn't need (or want) the chairs, but my great-grandmother was very attached to the chairs and didn't want them given away.

So my grandmother promised her mother that she would take the chairs when she moved back to Little Rock. In the meantime, the chairs were stored in Aunt Kat's attic. In the fullness of time, Grandmother moved back to Little Rock, got her mother's chairs out of the attic, refurbished them, painted them green, and put new seats on them. For many more years, these were my Grandmother's dining room and incidental chairs. When my Grandmother moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1980, the chairs went with her.

Many more years passed. When my Grandmother was 103, she moved into an assisted-living facility and simply did not have room for more than two of her mother's chairs. She fretted about them for days, until I promised to take the rest of the chairs. Even though I had no possible use for them. And they were very rickety, being by this time over 100 years old.

When my Grandmother died, the day before her 106th birthday, the remaining two chairs came to my house as well. Some had fallen apart by then. (See above.) But they are all in my house (or garage or shed) until I can either pass them along, or find the courage to toss them out. I have already promised the Drama Queen that she does not have to take the chairs when I am gone.

There was also a lot of potentially useful and/or interesting STUFF in the Old Shed:

Not all of it was useful or interesting, apparently. That looks like three large trash bags in the foreground. But some stuff was useful. These dishes, for example, were long ago replaced with real glass plates and bowls, but I was fairly sure there were people out there who could use some cheap crappy plastic dishes, at least until they break:

The dishes, along with a variety of other objects, like these rocker/gamer chairs that we bought when the young men in our family were quite small (i.e., quite a few years ago), and an array of duffle bags that apparently got dumped in the shed and were later replaced because we couldn't find them, were all given away on Freecycle:

,

Then there were these lovely galvanized pipes, which come with another typical family tale:

We bought those pipes the year we first came to Dodge, thinking we could use them to build a sukkah. What we didn't anticipate was that the weight of the pipes made the structure unsupportable. The sukkah we built with those pipes came tumbling down. Several times. Once with Media Guy in the middle. We used to have a picture of Media Guy surrounded by the collapsed sukkah, but as far as we can tell, we lost the camera with those pictures while on a family trip. Since then, we have been more diligent about downloading pictures to a computer after we take them.

The pipes went to a program for training plumbers. I do love Freecycle!

Eventually, the Old Shed was more-or-less empty:

What to do with an empty Old Shed? Put STUFF back in, of course. Actually, in the picture above you can see that we already moved a few things in. Those were some boards and bamboo mats that we use on top of our current sukkah. They were already in the Old Shed, but we neatened them up a bit.

After that, we moved our Passover dishes into the Old Shed.

And the rest of the sukkah stuff, -- actually just the lightweight poles that now form the frame of our sukkah, which you can get a glimpse of in an older post somewhere below.

And THEN!! Wow! Shelves in the New Shed were also cleaned out because most of the STUFF that we moved into the Old Shed had been in the New Shed:

Or maybe the New Shed wasn't quite so cleaned out:

We seem to have enough empty plastic bags to pick up dog poop from here to eternity. Another case of just tossing things out of sight and then having them conveniently also be out of mind.

In Memoriam

Seventeen years ago, give or take, I saw a small black and white kitten in the "Pet of the Week" picture in my local paper. I called the animal control officer and picked him up from the shelter the next day, after she had checked my credentials with my veterinarian. The instant I walked into the shelter, this tiny kitten started purring so loudly that he could have easily been mistaken for a motor.

At first, he was absolutely terrified of the Wizard. All we could figure out was that perhaps a man with a beard had scared him badly before he was dumped in the woods where Animal Control found him. At any rate, about the only time this kitten stopped purring was when the Wizard entered the room and the kitten ran out. Despite his aversion to bearded men, I called him Sweetpea because he was the sweetest cat I had met in a long time.

Today, Sweetpea's long life came to an end. And he purred loudly in my arms through his very last breath.

 Rest in peace, Sweetpea. You never were a very smart cat, but there are more important things in life than brains.

Blogs and painting ... and very little content

Over the weekend, while celebrating Sukkot, I realized that I need to break this down into multiple blogs. One needs to be about being Jewish in the Galut (our exile here in Dodge). And that's where I can talk about Sukkot.

And maybe I'll do one about food, which has consumed way too many hours over the past couple of weeks. When I say "consumed", I don't necessarily mean eating, though eating has definitely been a large part of it. But at some point I realized that I had spent 4 days preparing food, 2 days eating food (with help, I'll admit), and 1 day freezing leftover food. And then what happened? I had to go out and buy more food.

Food, like the laundry, appears to be eternal.

But this blog is about getting out of Dodge. We definitely need to eat while working on getting out of Dodge, but since we have to keep buying more food while we are doing the getting out, it's kind of hard to talk about clearing out the food as part of the process.

So, a short back-flash to some of the work we did over the summer. Actually, Sports Nut and Future Vet and Media Guy did most of this work. But I watched!

We (that is to say, they) painted:

That is Sports Nuts' new room, which has a cool alcove and some interesting roof lines. He chose a combination of greens to go along with the orange alcove (orange in honor of his orange cats). It actually looks pretty good now that it is all done.

And here's one of the bathrooms in process:

It may help to know that this bathroom used to be purple and who-knows-what. Now the walls are a tasteful pale gray and the woodwork is a darker gray. Much more in keeping with the adult dignity of the offspring, and (we hope) much more saleable than purple and yellow-ish.