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The Guest The new magnets are from Jeri's refrigerator. Jeri's fridge has some unusual stuff attached to it.
Another Gorey cartoon * Discussion * If you have anything to discuss, go to this link. Feel free to start a new discussion on anything. WHAT I'M READING... by I enjoyed his Australia book so much, I decided to try the one about this country. also Battersea
Park Road (this is a book I picked up in London) WHAT I'M WATCHING... A grammar school That's it for today!
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SOMEONE ELSE’S TREASURE 15 June 2001 It’s all going. Well--most of it. Or a lot of it. Or at least some of it. For several years now, our daughter-in-law has made it known that when Walt and I are gone, and the kids are left to handle our so-called "estate," she’s just going to blow the house up. I can’t imagine what it must be like to come here to visit, look around, and contemplate the two of us perishing in an airplane crash or having that semi roll over on top of us and realize that the responsibility of getting rid of all this "stuff" belongs to them. Where would they even start to get rid of the junk. (Actually I know exactly what it feels like, since that’s the situation which faced me after my father’s death. I solved the problem by just bringing it all here!) Well, when they plan to start is now. And where they plan to start is with a giant garage sale. Ned announced that they are having "The second best garage sale ever" the weekend of July 13-14 (coincidentally, the same weekend we will be in Cincinnati, and unable to retrieve any precious treasures that might find it to the sale pile "accidentally.") "I will be over to help you clean up," he said. He chose a day when Walt was at work, since it’s sometimes easier to discard things when Walt doesn’t realize they are being taken out of the house. He and I started in "the big bedroom." This is the bedroom that at one time housed four boys plus one or two foreign students. Now you can barely fit one person in there to sleep, it’s piled so high with junk. In fairness, we have acquired a lot of stuff after Paul’s and David’s deaths, plus things left behind after children moved out, and things we hauled here from either my father’s house or Gilbert’s house after their deaths (both of those occurred ~15 years ago and I swear I’m going to get around to sorting through them any day now). The first to go were the clothes. All of Paul’s and David’s clothes, packed in huge boxes, taking up most of the room. "Just move them out. I don’t even want to open the boxes," I said, stoically. They are gone. I won’t be there when people are pawing through them, trying them on, or when, after the sale, they are carted off to the homeless shelter. It’s better that way. We got a lot of junk moved out of that room. Old computer parts that have long since passed their prime, a sewing machine that hasn’t been touched in 20 years. Marta thinks perhaps we can part with at least one of the four vacuum cleaners we seem to have acquired. We’ve left the books. Walt has strict rules about the books. Jeri, bless her heart, catalogued them all when she was living here one summer, so we have a fighting chance of knowing what we have and where to find it. Unless it gets taken off the database, it doesn’t leave the room, so we just left all the books. After Ned filled his car with all of our stuff, I began to try to be somewhat ruthless going through the house here. The two espresso machines that belonged to Paul which had gathered much dust over the years. Outta here. All the cake pans I used to use a lot and don’t intend to ever use again--out. Crocheted items that were gifts over the years that I never had any place to put--gone. A bazillion cups that we never use--no more. A large box of cookbooks have moved out to make room for the binders containing all of Steve’s on-line diary and the trip photo albums that have had to rest on the coffee table because I had no bookcase space for them. As a matter of fact, the coffee table is gone too. As is the couch. Yesterday my eyes lit on the deep fat fryer which fried many a won ton in its day, but which hasn’t been used in forever. It’s in the pile. Today the plan is to clean out a closet. Why do we need all those sleeping bags if we don’t intend to ever camp again (and I certainly have no plans to ever sleep on a rocky ground again!). Ned comes over on a regular basis, loads up the car, sneaks upstairs to bring down more boxes that I force myself not to look in. We’ve gotten rid of an awful lot of stuff and it feels good to "divest." It’s nice to open a cupboard without fear of a cup falling on your head. The problem is that most things have come from closets or drawers or cupboards and to look at this house, you’d never know I’d moved anything out. I’ll save all that stuff for the "THIRD greatest garage sale ever." But it does feel good to finally be making a dent in all of this stuff. Time to say goodbye to a lot of useless old stuff, clear away the cobwebs, and start de-cluttering life. One
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Some pictures from this
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Created 6/13/01 by Bev Sykes |
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