Rain, Rain Stay Away

It's Sunday morning and here I stand in the garage surveying the lay of the boxes. But first, breakfast. I decided that after the $200.00 electric bill I got, I would cook on my grill outside this morning and not heat up the house. Bacon, eggs and grilled toast with orange juice and coffee. It was good and I really think food tastes better when cooked outside. Besides it drives the neighbors nuts to smell good food hanging in the air.

After breakfast dishes were done. More boxes made their way to the car, trash put in the trashcan and.... WHAT WAS THAT NOISE? Was that THUNDER I heard off in the distance. I went in to have Dave check the weather and he said I should be OK until this evening.

I have cleared the area in question and lo and behold there is the 6 drawer chest that I was trying to get to. However I have just been informed that the rain is about an hour away so progress had to stop and all the stuff that had been out on the patio I now had to get back in the garage. That's the only thing that is wrong with all of this. I can't leave it out in inclement weather. So if I want to sell it in August I will need to keep it dry. Oh well it's the end of another weekend an time to go get some dinner.

With all that I am finding I think that we will have a fairly good garage sale. So here is to finding more "stuff". 920 days and counting.

See ya out there...

The Garage...Round Two

It's Friday evening and PIZZA NIGHT. We have pizza every Friday night, homemade from Wal-Mart. We generally get a pepperoni pizza and then add mushrooms to it. For the price we can't get any better, thin and crispy.

Tonight we will be mapping out a strategy for tackling the next section of the garage. We have divided it into 9 sections. Last week we tackled the recycling area of the garage, Saturday and Sunday we will delve into the next quadrant and tackle that.

It's a slow process. We have a big trashcan that the city provided and they pick up the trashcan with a big motorized arm on a truck which dumps the trash and shakes the can before setting it back on the curb, it's operated by a single person. If everything is not in the trashcan but out on the curb beside the trashcan the city will not pick that up and will have to wait until the following week for pick-up. That is why the process is slow.

Saturday morning and coffee in hand on the patio. It's already warm outside and only going to get hotter. More "stuff" pulled out of quadrant 2 this morning. Saw a funny sign yesterday at a garage sale. GARAGE SALE... STUFF FOR SALE! Yes, I guess we all have "stuff," and I sure don't need someone else's "stuff." I have enough "stuff" to get rid of myself.

Just found a plethora of children's coloring books and dried up markers, old crayons and trinkets a little girl would love to have. What children's treasures have I discovered? In the 5th grade my youngest daughter participated in an invention fair at her school. Her invention was children's house slippers with little flashlights in the toes. Everyone who saw them thought it was a great idea. A year later they were on the market but patented by someone else. The following year she made a sweater drying hanger by attaching telescoping antennas to a heavy duty quilt hanger. We still have it and use it. It eliminates the shoulder bumps and the sweaters dry beautifully. Once again someone took her idea and year later was using her idea but made in plastic and selling them on the home shopping channel. So if your child or grandchild comes up with what seems like a great idea don't let it pass you by.

I have a whole box of decent toys and trinkets and will set up a children's table and sell the items for a nickle apiece at the garage sale in August. I have one of those Shark Steamers and will hit all the items with a shot of steam before I put them out for sale.

I really hate to throw certain things away but in this case it is a must, a whole box of sheet music. It now smells like grandma's wet basement. However I do have the Chorus books to the three operas that I sang in with Tulsa Opera. Those I might have to hang onto a little longer. Dave use to belong to Rotary and we found a whole box of stuff from those by-gone days, so out it goes. Am I getting ruthless yet?


Christie and I just got back from taking a whole load (the back end of the suburban) of recyclables to the recycle station. More stuff gone. I can now see a portion of the floor of the garage.


Tomorrow we will tackle the stack of boxes that have been saved, I want to get to the chest of drawers that is behind them and unload the drawers that are full of magazines


See ya out there...

Father's Day and the Garage

I announced Friday evening that this weekend we would start on the garage. We decided that we had a plan and we would work on the garage in sections.

Saturday morning rolled around and after I had my first and only cup of coffee we got started. The area closest to the back door was where we would start as it would be easy to bring stuff out onto the patio. But first I had to dispose of a bag of paper that had been around since 2005. We had decided long ago that anything with any important information on it would be destroyed somehow. This bag has been hanging because I didn't want to deal with it at the time. Today I dealt with it. There was all sorts of stuff in it that needed destroying but I was determined that I was not going to run it through my new shredder as there was a lot of dirt involved and i didn't want to destroy my shredder. So I got out the fire pit and started burning the items that need to be disposed of and the rest was put in a plastic bag to be taken to the recycling drop spot.

Dave hauled out bag after bag of plastic that was no longer being used that I went through and determined that most of it could be dumped but there was some of the items that could be sold in the garage sale that we are going to have in August when the students start to come back to town and are looking for bargains. I found a set of curtains given to me from our neighbors house 10 years ago. I will cut them down this next week and have Dave put them up in my bedroom as they are room darkening and they're all the right colors to boot.

Out came empty shoe boxes that we can dispose of. We kept them because the kids were needing them for dioramas for when they were in elementary and middle school how many years ago? The youngest is now 27. Out came items for serving food to large amounts of people. Those might come in handy when we hit the road, we will just have to see. Bags of rags and old clothes made an appearance and were quickly disposed of. Boxes of old taxes that we still have to keep were discovered an stored in the shed (That too will have to be gone through). We even discovered a Rubbermaid cleaning caddy that was loaded with cleaning supplies from my daughters house in Shawnee while she was in school there 10 years ago. It got emptied and cleaned up and discovered some items that were still usable, so cleaned the containers off and now I have a cleaning caddy that is now in good order. Recycled a lot of old plastic #1 and #2 containers. We are in the process of getting some containers for the garage to put recyclables in to make it easier to sort and take to the drop spot.

I even found my fathers wool blanket from the U.S. Navy in WWII. We washed it but it is full of moth holes but the printing is still on it so I may cut it to put in with the the book that I am working on about the love letters my dad wrote to my mom during WWII.

Once again I ask myself why are we keeping so much "stuff"? However today was a good start and once it became too hot to work outside (100 degrees) we came in and cooled off by emptying the front closet and carted off a bunch of coats and raincoats and hats to the Salvation Army Family Store.

Christie and I went to the store to pick up the fixing's for dinner tomorrow. We are going to have boneless ribs fixed in the crock pot and then I am going to do some baby back ribs on the grill along with grilled green bell peppers, red, yellow and orange sweet peppers, onions, mushrooms along with grilled corn on the cob and homemade bar-b-cue sauce.

My brother and his wife surprised us and we went off to Van's Pig Stand for dinner, a must place to eat. It's celebrating it's 80th birthday. For a description and a bit of history on Van's see the attached link above.

Sunday morning had brought us clear weather and out on the patio I am with my cup of coffee going through more stuff. It's mind boggling to think we kept all of this instead of dealing with it at an earlier date. Dave just brought me another load of things to go through. Ugh, will it ever end. Just how much stuff is in the garage? That's easy to answer...too much! I already have several boxes packed with old chemicals and such that will have to wait until next springs clean-up day to dispose of. More stuff to the curb, actually we have to put it in a garbage can and a truck comes along and dumps it. It is full to the brim so will have to pack more in next weekend.

Christie and I went all over Norman trying to find propane and had to go to south Oklahoma City to get some. It is more expensive than gas $3.13 a gallon. Dinner is on the grill and the corn on the cob is just about ready to pull off.

To all you Dad's out there...here's wishing you a wonderful Father's Day. If your children have grown an moved away. Remember all the wonderful times you had with them while they were growing up. The little league games, soccer games, school activities, camping trips and teaching them how to fish. If you are getting ready to be a dad, just think of all the wonderful things you have to look forward to. And to those dads that have children at home still...cherish these moments as they are fleeting. Remember to teach your children well.
Happy Father's Day...928 days and counting.

See ya out there...

Memories Like the Corners of My Mind...

What's the saying? A picture is worth a thousand words? What about memories? Well...What About Memories!!!! Today I delved into a sore spot in my room and found box after box of pictures of the kids when they were young. "Remember this camping trip?" I would quip to Dave. "No, I have no memory of it" How is that possible? I remembered every little odd-ball memory of the trip with the help of the pictures. Where we were, what we did, how we felt, the head lice episode etc...and he has no memory of it? Now I see why it takes so long to get rid of stuff. You have to relive the memories so you can remember them and then let the item go.

For instance I found a Social Security Certificate from 1950 for my grandfather that said his first months payment was going to be $101.65, but the rest of the payments for the year would only be $33.50 a month. Now why do I need to keep that? My mother did, do I? Is there some significance in it, a bit of history perhaps? I found my grandfathers Death Certificate as well and discovered what my great-grandmother's maiden name was, now that is something I can use in my research.

Is everything relevant or irrelevant? I want to know. Why do we keep what we keep. 8+ boxes of our family pictures of the girls activities,sports, family stuff and camping and we're not talking shoe boxes, I mean big boxes of pictures. Dave has been trying to get them all onto DVD's but there are just so many of them. That's not counting all the boxes we have of my mother's pictures from the 1940's or family pictures of us kids growing up. Then there are my grandmother's family pictures. At least Dave's sister has the family pictures in Canada otherwise we would not have room in the house for it all. We are trying to downsize if that is possible.

Then I have all the pictures of the day care kids that I took care of years ago. All the fun things we did as a group. The places we went. I'm still in touch with some of the parents and think I will give them their child's pictures to them. I sure don't need them any longer.

Now take clothes. You look at every article of clothing and think will I ever be able to get back into this, maybe if I loose enough weight. Or...remember when you wore this to that party and the great time you had and so on and so on. Took three bags of clothes to the Salvation Army Family Store over the weekend. Gosh it felt good to get rid of them. Need to get rid of more.
Time to put all of it away until next weekend. 935 days and counting.

See ya out there...