Closet Philosophy

I’ve been cleaning out a closet for the last couple of days, and even though very little has actually made it to the transfer station, am starting to see progress.
I’m about on track with the 80/20 rule: 75% of the “stuff” is sorted, and most of this is recyclable or donate-able, like shoes and clothes, some in very good shape.
I’ve even found a couple of things that I can use, like a pottery wind chime and a travel alarm clock.
I don’t usually like making trips down memory lane, but this one has been painless, at least psychically: I’ve had only one good leg to work with.
The intimidating part of this exercise, though, is that it’s taking a while just to clean out one closet. I’ll eventually have to do the same to the entire house, plus about half the basement.
It is a consolation that closets are the worst because they’re the places for stuffing clutter.

October

It’s the first of October, and definitely time to think about Halloween and Thanksgiving.
This past weekend, Emme, James and I went to the Harvest Fest at the Fairgrounds. It’s a mellow, homely, wholesome event, and I look forward to it every year.

Continue reading October

Intentional Ugliness

I wonder if spammers, big company executives, advertisers and corporate attorneys were all spawned from the same wretched source, maybe Zeus’s backside rather than his head.
What a wonderful world it would be if they would all simply – disappear.

Homely Archeology

I was asked to fill out a ton of paperwork this week, and most of it hit the fan yesterday afternoon which, one notes, was warm and humid, not the sort of day for house cleaning.
One of the documents requested was my college diploma. This is the sort of thing that one does not use every day, so it was not in plain sight or in an obvious spot.
I finally found it, in a cardboard box which was only one of many pulled out of a closet, along with ancient collection dolls, shoes, old computer equipment and disks, and useless banking records.
So at this point, I’m staring at several piles of boxes and stuff, not all of it mine, but most of it destined for a different, perhaps better, place than here.

Easy Come, Easy 90% Go

I’ve been holding on to an old, pre-IPO stock certificate for the last seven years and realized earlier this week that the company went public this past February.
Unfortunately, the company effected a reverse split at the time, so my shares were worth only about 10% of what I’d figured.
Well, it’s still “found money”, and maybe the shares will be worth something to my grandkids some day.

James and the Electric Cart

I’ve been having trouble with my right leg, and yesterday managed to tear or pop something in the knee, so I bought myself a cane.
I’d promised to do two errands: pick up James from his after-school club and do a little shopping at Roche Brothers, which is having a big sale on about a dozen different types of poultry and meat.
As I was hobbling in to the store, one of the staff asked if I’d like to use an electric shopping cart.
This turned out to be a lot of fun, so much so that when I got out to fight the crowd at the meat case, James decided he was going to be the driver by default, and me the passenger.
Amazingly, no one seemed to mind, maybe because he did an excellent job, even driving the cart through the checkout. Must be all that practice with video games.
It was incredibly cool that a mundane chore turned into a few minutes of real entertainment, both for us and, so it seemed, for the people watching us. The only bad part was having to leave the cart behind.

I Need a New Laptop

My Dell Inspiron 5160, which I bought about 3 years ago, is noisy and running out of disk space.
I could look into upgrading it, but having had a chance to work with an iMac for the last several months, I’ve been thinking about investing in a MacBook Pro instead.
Decisions, decisions.