Again with the hair color

A few months ago I wrote about my internal debate between Vanity & Common Sense over hair color. The end result was that after weeks of thought I bought a box of color and a few more days of dithering, I actually used the color. Now that it is 3 months later I naturally have some root issues.  But this isn’t about that. It  is about that internal debate though.

I have naturally wavy hair.  Stupid looking waves at that.  No matter the cut may hair is too wavy to hang right and not wavy enough to really curl. I got my first perm at 13 to correct this problem.  For the next 15 years I alternated between periods of perm curls and periods of flat iron straightness. It just depended on which was less effort to achieve. (Common Sense holds the long term decisions. Vanity knows it’s not worth the fight) The perm would be nice & curly for a couple months & then it would start to require a lot of mousse & gel and a diffuser …. Then it would be easier to just get couple large pins to hold it flat while it dried then smooth it out with a flat iron. (the gel, teasing & hairspray necessary for creating the requisite  big bangs and side wings of the 80’s were a constant and did not figure into the overall effort).  I dyed it various shades of red or burgundy at intervals as well to keep Vanity happy

Then one day when I was 28 I cut it all off.  Too many perms, too many straighteners, too much color. The hair was damaged beyond repair & honestly I had no idea what my real hair was like, so Common Sense went for hair about 2 inches long all over and waited. Vanity invested in hats.

Over the next year it grew back in the sort of mouse brown color I remembered but it grew in CURLY! Not stupid waves but real honest to god spiral curls! The hair I had dreamed of! Vanity & Common Sense were both thrilled!

I always had this idea in my mind that the sudden appearance of real honest to god spiral curls was hormonal. I was turning 30 and other things were happening with my body, hair & nails, so why not curls? At least for a bit. I also suspected that ‘this too shall pass’. That when I hit my 40’s and other hormonal things started happened the curls might not survive.

I was right.

It took about 18 months of gradual change but it has become too much work to make my hair curl. The stupid waves are back & my hair is finer than it used to be (Despite vitamin supplements). So I am now experimenting with a straight look for the first time in over a decade.

Vanity is going to miss those curls but Commons Sense knew they weren’t mine to keep and now that I have straight hair I have the opportunity to do something Vanity has been considering for a couple of years. 

I’ve always wanted to get some color streaks in my hair – purple, green or blue. But Vanity didn’t think they would look right with the wavy curls so I never did. But now I have straight hair. And then I found this yesterday at Walgreens

The perfect shade of purple. Obviously I am not going for the all over look. I just want some streaks near the front, maybe the sides too. But Common Sense is wondering just how I am going to manage that without getting dye spots all over my hair.  Vanity is a bit concerned too. Oddly Vanity is also thinking that maybe 41 year olds with wrinkles might look a bit ridiculous with purple streaks in the hair. Like maybe they are trying too hard to be young. Vanity let Insecurity have a vote you see.

Vanity would also sort of like the all over purple look but Insecurity will not hear of it.

So if you have any advice on how I might manage streaks without dye smudges elsewhere in my hair or have an opinion about whether I will look odd with the streaks, let me have it.

So it’s Ash Wednesday

As I am now a pagan this has no real meaning to me. But as a former Catholic I still have this vague feeling that I ought to be at Mass, or coming up with something to give up or going to confession. Lent always reminds me of confession

There is some sort of rule about going to confession during Lent so you can go to communion during the year as I recall. Possibly the rules have changed. It’s been awhile

Forgive me father for I have sinned. It has been…hmm…1981 I think…so it’s been 28 years since my last confession & I’ve been busy since then coveting and having other gods before me.

I’m fairly sure you don’t even have to say that bit anymore.

I was in Catholic school for 12 years and we went to confession twice a year from grade 2 to 8 and once a year after. (Which is odd really because the potential to sin increases once you are teen, especially the venal ones.  Do they still differentiate venal from mortal?)

I always found confession to be an unsatisfying experience. I never felt relief at having the weight of my sins removed with confession & penance. Not because I was a die hard sinner or because I felt so guilty recalling my sins but because I *couldn’t* recall them. That was awkward. There I am sitting face to face with a priest who has known me since baptism & he’s waiting to hear how I failed to honor my parents or was mean to my friends or brother and I have nothing. Nothing comes to mind. I suppose it was the pressure to perform that drove the sins right out of my head. I was sure I had sinned, but couldn’t come up with any specifics. “Can we just leave it at God knows what I have done & I am sorry?” I asked once, but it doesn't work like that. You need to unburden yourself of details and admit your specific faults to be forgiven.

So usually I made up things. They were things that I had probably done, so they weren’t outright lies, but they weren’t exactly the truth either. And I could never bring myself to add “plus all the lies I’ve just been telling you” to the end of my confession, so the only sin that I actually could remember the details of was left unconfessed.

I always wondered what the other kids did. Did they actually remember that 4 months ago they talked back to their father? Or that 3 months ago they stole someone’s snack or pushed someone on the playground? Usually these things would come back to me a day or so after confession but I always spent the time leading up to my turn in the box wracking my brain to come up with something to confess.

This awkwardness led me to start avoiding confession as soon as I could. In grade school we went into the church one grade at a time, to see one or two priests. 17-20 kids watched over by a teacher & a couple of nuns usually. Lined up in order of height or alphabetically. You sat in order on the left side pews. One by one you went into the booth. 2 people stood in the aisle at a time waiting their turn. People doing penance sat in order on the right side pews. There was no getting out of it.

It was different in high school. There 150 kids in my class and we went into a much larger church, with another class. There were 6 priests in the confessionals. There were nuns & teachers around but they were mostly watching the exits so no used the opportunity to play hooky. There were no rules about sitting on the right or left side or how many people could stand in a line outside a booth. People were praying at the altar or in pews or at various stations of the cross. It was easy to get up, wander a bit, say a prayer or two (I’m sorry I can’t remember my sins Lord, please forgive me) & sit back down someplace else. No one asked, it was on your conscience.

Probably ought to add deliberate avoidance & deception of confession attendance to my list of sins.

So now here I am, 28 years since my last confession and 17 years since my self dedication to the Goddess, still feeling vaguely like I need to go get ashes today.  It’s strange what sticks with you over time.

Nom nom nom cereal nom nom

I love cereal. My husband loves cereal. My kids love cereal. Cereal is a family affair. It can be breakfast, or lunch, or snack, or even dessert. If I am home alone, it often is dinner. Sometimes it is a late night snack. It can be eaten dry or soaked in milk. I prefer it with milk but the males tend to eat it dry.

My favorite is Honey Nut Cheerios. Mayhem likes Reese’s Puffs and Havoc & DH are partial to Cinnamon Toast Crunch.  We’re a General Mills sort of family. DH & I both grew up on Coca Puffs, Kix, Cookie Crisp and Lucky Charms. He takes issue with Cookie Crisp these days day so we don’t buy it but the rest of them appear in rotation in our cupboards. It never lasts long.  General Mills sent me a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch to review last Thursday. It was gone by Saturday evening. Cinnamon toast is one of DH’s favorite snack. Cinnamon Toast Crunch saves him waiting for the bread to toast and he doesn’t have to get a knife dirty spreading butter.

Breakfast often looks like a cereal commercial, everyone with a bowl of cereal with milk and a glass of juice and I find myself mentally hearing “Calcium & vitamin D fortified, nutritious breakfast. 8 grams of whole wheat, less than 12 grams of sugar” in a 70’s commercial voice over tone. All I need is the rabbit to appear at the doorway.

The true beauty of cereal, as my parents & in-laws could tell you is = the kids can serve themselves! I, like my parents, eagerly looked forward to the day when the kids could be trusted to pour a little milk in their bowls. because then I could leave bowls & boxes on the counter Friday night, put some milk in a juice bottle in the fridge and SLEEP IN Saturday morning!  My kids get up at 6am, only because the rule is you can’t get out of bed before then. Cereal for breakfast means we get to stay in bed until almost 7 (because about 45 minutes or so of unobserved togetherness is all the boys can manage before a fight breaks out)

But cereal is often evil in foodie & parenting circles.  I should be up at the crack of dawn boiling oats to serve with my home preserved fruit or grinding whole grains to make waffles. Possibly I should be making veggie omelets or maybe egg white veggie omelets with tofu.

Yeah, that’s going to happen.

I might toast a waffle & spread some peanut butter on it, but that is about as much effort as I can manage before my coffee. Cereal is awesome. It’s always ready to go & you can’t beat that when you are not a morning person & have to drag your tired butt out of bed at 6am.

Yet Another Jay and Deb Production.

Weekly Winners - week 8

There seems to be a lot of food this week.

My favorite beverage

I made granola bars

We went to Buffalo Wild Wings for 99 cent kid meal night

The balloon dinosaur had some fried mushrooms

I went to Sam’s

This guy came with me to make sure I didn’t forget the dino nuggets

Havoc’s weekly winner

For more Weekly Winners please visit Lotus at Sarcastic Mom

Free form flight thoughts

I figure since I am going to stress about this flying thing in the back of my mind anyway I might as well be proactive & pick a specific thing to focus on.  Something I can actively control. Today it is

LUGGAGE.

Should I check a bag or save myself the bag checking & retrieving hassle by shipping our clothes UPS? The cost is about the same really, since US Airways charges $15 to check a bag and UPS charged me $25 to ship 2 boxes to my folks over Christmas. UPS will actually ship the suitcase, no box required.

It's not like we'll be needing those shorts & tees I am packing for another 4-6 weeks after we return. But there is the toiletries issue. We'll need the toiletries right up until we leave and TSA has made flying with shampoo, toothpaste, mascara & hair gel a bit of a challenge. I didn't really think about how much personal care stuff I have until I considered the number of 3oz bottles I would need to find. Shampoo, face cleanser, razor (which will have to travel by UPS), moisturizer, curl control cream, anti frizz spray (which is a necessity in FL), body lotion, eye cream, mascara (which may not be regulated), toothpaste and body wash.  And they all have to fit in 1 quart zip bag.  Fortunately I am traveling with 2 boys who between them only need one 3oz bottle & can share my toothpaste, so technically I have 3 one quart bags to fill, though one probably ought to hold snacks. But it does mean trusting them not to misplace my mascara & body wash.

Or I could just check a bag and fill all 3 quart bags with snacks,as long as they are not gel like snacks, like PB&J sandwiches. Apparently turkey on rye (no mayo) is ok though, and stuffing, but not cranberry sauce, unless it is less than 3 ounces. Would mac & cheese be considered a solid or gel?

It says I can bring a 'reasonable amount' of juice beyond 3ozs if I am traveling with children. Define 'children'. Define 'reasonable'. I suppose it depends on the TSA agent. A parent of young children might likely agree with me that 8 6.75oz juice boxes are reasonable for a 5 & 6 year old to drink over what is a minimum 4 hour period, allowing some extra for any delays.  A single person might consider a 5 & 6 year old could do just fine with one each. Personally I'd agree with them if it wasn't for the whining that would ensue, but mostly because I don't want to be taking the kids to the bathroom every 10 minutes in the airport.

Managing young boys in the airport ladies room is really impossible. You have to use the handicap accessible stall to accommodate everything because they can't be trusted to STAY PUT and watch the luggage while you do your business or not to wander off when they are done with theirs or to remember they came in with a backpack, so everyone & everything gets crammed in one stall together. And the odds of running into someone who actually needs the handicap accessible stall are much much higher than in my local Safeway. So then I have guilt for using the stall.

I suppose I could just buy juice but I *hate* buying things I have at home, things that reasonably I ought not to have to buy at inflated airport prices.

It says the TSA agent might test the juice for explosives.

I think the boys would find that the highlight of the trip.

I’m not sure how that happened

I am sort of a foodie and I am a parent. I follow food blogs and food forums and parenting blogs and parenting forums. This means I am constantly running into the food police

“You aren’t eating *that* are you?”

“You wouldn’t let your child eat *this* would you?”

Actually, yes I probably am and would. I’m one of those moderation people who doesn’t think food is evil or a magic cure all. If you believe every food related story out there nearly all foods will kill you, if they don’t make you live to be 100, except for those that they thought would make you live to be 100 but turns out they will kill you – or maybe not (eggs anyone?). And if they aren’t currently killing you or making you live to be 100 they are poisoned with salmonella. Food just can’t be trusted.

I stopped paying attention a long time ago, apart from the salmonella stories & I just buy what my picky eaters will eat. Sometimes I go for the organic versions, like apples, but mostly I buy what is cheapest. The only food I ‘police’ is juice. My kids drink a lot and because I water it down and am cheap, I make sure it is 100% fruit juice. I’m not paying good money for watered down flavored high fructose corn syrup, when the real thing is practically the same price. And high fructose corn syrup is evil so I can be all smug that I am avoiding it.

But, of course, HFCS is in everything, so I can only be so smug.

Or can I?

Tuesday morning I got involved in a debate about HFCS and those commercials about how it’s fine in moderation & how dare they say that when it is everything & moderation just isn’t possible. Which I agree with. I still had this debate in mind when I cleaned out & reorganized my pantry & fridge in preparation for a Sam’s Club trip. I don’t read labels much so I thought it’s be interesting to make a pile of all the food in my house with HFCS & see what I can find to replace it with non HFCS items.

This is the pile

Seriously? It’s not in the cereal or the oatmeal or the applesauce or the Ragu or the Mac & Cheese or the fruit chews? Turns out there is fruit in the fruit chews. And corn syrup in the cereal but not HFCS. Somehow something that is in ‘everything’ isn’t in everything in my house, but only in the 2 flavors of yogurt my kids love that I cannot replicate.

I’m not sure how that happened because as I said, apart from juice, I don’t pay attention to it. Admittedly there is no soda in the house at the moment, but my kids don’t drink it when there is. I buy Breyers ice cream on the occasions I buy ice cream but I checked at the store & there is no HFCS in it. So now I have to go back to that thread and change my opinion.  Apparently moderation in HFCS is entirely possible, even when you aren’t paying attention.

And I do actually get to be smug about the lack of HFCS in our diet. Bonus!

Tuesday’s Tribute

This one is for my hubby, who is one hell of a guy and has put up with my general life obliviousness for nearly 20 years.

He does the dishes.

He cooks dinner for the boys at least once a week.

He got up and brought the babies to me or fed the babies bottles at night.

He’d changed more diapers than I had by the time DS1 was 2 weeks old & continued to change at least a quarter of them.

He does nearly all the driving when we go on a trip.

He took the broken toilet to the dump in a prompt and timely manner.

He brings me flowers for no reason.

He loves me in spite of myself.

and most of all…..

he got my internet fixed in time for Valentine’s day (that’s him on the ground)

Thanks honey for all you do for me.

A Jay and Deb Production.

Keeping the Romance Alive

Our gym offers a Parents Night Out babysitting event once a month. It lasts from 3 to 4 hours & costs about $8 an hour for the 2 kids together. They had one Saturday from 4-8pm. Four hours without the kids for only $32? Sign us up!

But then there is the problem of what to do for 4 hours. It was Valentine’s Day so we made dinner reservations for 5pm at the Thai place. We wandered around the library for about a half hour then browsed an extremely pricy for the crap they were selling ‘antique’ store for a bit, then went to dinner. It was a nice dinner, but we were done at 5:45 & still had over 2 hours of non-refundable childcare to use. So we did what couples all over the area do on Saturday nights.

We went to Wal Mart.

We spent a romantic hour or so looking at cheap dressers and tents and big screen TVs and sorting through rechargeable batteries hoping to find one that fit any of our cameras. We bought milk.

Then we went to Target.

And did more of the same, except for the milk

At 7:15 we met another couple, who’s kids were also at the PNO, for coffee at Starbucks. 

They’d been to Lowes where they looked at toilet seats and bought a new bag for their vacuum cleaner.

It really was a nice evening. Time together without kids, being able to complete a sentence uninterrupted, not having to be constantly checking the whereabouts of others.  It was nice being along together. But I think you have to be in a long term, long time relationship to see it.

Pity we hadn’t thought of sex in the backseat until much to late to do it.

Weekly Winners – week 7

I've got quite a few photos this week to make up for last week.

My internet went out Wednesday evening when a windstorm had gusts strong enough to actually rip the guy wires out of the ground and topple the 50 foot pole that holds our receiver. Normally it just blows the antenna around like a weathervane but this time it was strong enough to bend the pole and pull it down

Because of the bend it is no longer collapsible, so we can’t re-erect it ourselves. We needed one of these

Just to give you an idea of scale

There is no way boys can resist a giant bucket truck

Erecting the pole, (they eventually got it straight but the sun was setting so I didn’t get a photo)

Not only are my boys fighting with sticks, they are doing it on the roof.

I know this looks like a Tonka truck with dinosaurs in it but actually it is an AT-AT full of storm troopers. (we’ve been in major Star Wars mode here lately.)

It’s under attack by rebel pilots

Curse you rebels!!

Later the dinosaurs exchanged Valentine’s Day cards

Windy Weather Woes

The Windy defeats me again!

At least it didn't wreck my car this time, like it did last year, but look at my internet receiver



It's not supposed to be on the ground!!!

The winds were gusting so strongly Wednesday evening that they bent the pole so much it pulled the guy wires out of the ground and toppled over.

See that 30 degree bend in the pole? This pole is not going back up. It has to be replaced. Which means my receiver will remain on the ground for awhile.

Rumors of a bucket truck coming to my house Saturday have been mooted but it's supposed to rain tomorrow and you can't erect metal poles in the rain. (not that we haven't but this would be people under company insurance doing it so it won't happen)

I'm used to the weather playing merry hell with my internet. The ISP has equipment hanging on towers all over the place and sometimes they get hit with freak lightening strikes or power outages or the wind knocks things askew and someone goes out & repairs things. Normally about an hour or so later the internet is back. I just leave my Outlook open and go about my business and every so often I check to see if I have new mail. If it says 'delivery failure' iIknow the internet is still down, if it doesn't then I am back up. But this time it's just me, not lots of people, so there is no big rush. I'm having a hard time remembering that the receiver is on the ground & even if it could get signal the cable snapped when it toppled over so there is no way for any signal to get to me.

I still keep compulsively checking my Outlook every couple of hours, hoping the broadband fairies have come.

I've had lots of time to play in Lightroom with no internet. I was going for a 'grim' look with those photos because I'm feeling pretty grim about my internet.

More from the junk closet

I’ve shared this photo of the CD tower before. And my speculation

that there are more CDs somewhere.

I want this tower to go in this week’s dump run so I pulled all the CDs out of it and sorted through them.

I alphabetized them, removed the duplicates, matched loose discs up to empty cases  and in true college form (since most of these were bought when we were in college) I stored them in milk crates

I am missing a bunch of CDs. There is only 1 Bon Jovi CD and only 1 Duran Duran CD and that simply is not possible. I owned all their albums up through 1990 or so.  There is no Berlin, no Guns & Roses, no Siouxie & the Banshees, no Rolling Stones.

No Rolling Stones!!

Possibly I tossed the bulk of my 80’s pop CDs when I burned them to MP3 but I wouldn’t have tossed the Stones, or Bon Jovi. But there is no other tower anywhere in the house or the sheds.  Suddenly this has gotten expensive.  I’m going to have to go buy those albums again.

For your enjoyment, this is a partial list of some of the music we liked enough to pay $12-18 a CD for.

AC/DC, ABBA, Alice in Chains, The B-52s, Barenaked Ladies, Belly, Ben Folds Five, Blackmore’s Night, Blue Blue Blue, Blue Oyster Cult, Bon Jovi, Edi Brickell & the New Bohemians, Meredith Brooks, Bush, Concrete Blond, The Cult, The Cure, Owen Davis, Dead, Can Dance, def Leppard, Duran Duran, Digital Underground, Fleetwood Mac, Pink Floyd, Foo Fighters, 4 Non Blonds, Gaelic Storm, Granny’s 12 Gauge, Grateful Dead, Hayseed Dixie, HooDoo Gurus, Hootie & the Blowfish, Indigo Girls, INXS, Jewel, Journey, Led Zeppelin, Local H, Love & Rockets, Ziggy Marley, Loreena McKennit, Meatloaf, Meat Puppets, Medieval Babes, Moody Blues, Alanis Morissette, This Mortal Coil, Motley Crue, Stevie Nicks, Nine Inch Nails, No Doubt, Offspring, Pearl Jam, Liz Phair, the Pixies, Robert Plant, The Police, The Presidents of the United States of America, Primus, Queen, Radiohead, Rancid, REM, Rush, Paul Simon, 63 Eyes, Smashing Pumpkins, Smashmouth, The Stone Roses, the Smiths, the Smithereens, Sublime, 10,000 Maniacs, Van Halen, Violent Femmes and Weird Al Yankovic

I need to find the rest of my CDs. I’m missing a bunch

Apparently I didn’t get the memo

I’ve been on Facebook for a couple of years.  I don’t honestly know how long because I hardly ever go out there. I don’t really ‘get’ Facebook or at least I didn’t until a week or so ago.

I have a Facebook account because some people I know online had Facebook accounts & everyone was sending one another flair or maybe throwing food at each other, I can’t recall, but I wanted to get in on it. But after I threw a few soba noodles around there didn’t seem to be much point to the place. Everyone else was talking about how they were reconnecting with people from high school & other old friends. 

No one I knew was on Facebook. Nobody. I was the only person in my high school class there. There were 2 people from my class on MySpace and I found a few people I think were kids of former classmates, but no one I knew, or used to know in real life, was on Facebook as recently as 4 months ago.

Suddenly though there are a bunch of people I used to know on Facebook.  It’s like everyone got a Facebook page for Christmas, like the reunion committee sent out a letter to the class saying to join Facebook. There are about 18 people from my class of 150 currently on Facebook. My SIL is on Facebook. People from my old neighborhood are suddenly on Facebook.

Did I miss the memo?

Possibly I never got it because I was already on Facebook.

I am enjoying it. It’s nice to be able to catch up with people, to pick up old friendships & make new ones with people I wasn’t all that close to then. But it’s going to take a little getting used to.

I’m still not quite sure about the whole Facebook experience. But someone sent me a sudoku game and I’ve lost approximately 6 hours so far playing mind games as a result.

Weekly Winners week 6

Just a few photos this week. I’ve been playing in Lightroom with effects

It snowed briefly this week

Mayhem is getting a bit big for the car carts

My collection of Vera Bradley

For more weekly winners please visit Lotus at Sarcastic Mom.

Oh yeah! I had CDs

This is one of the random pieces of furniture stuck in a corner in the junk room with stuff piled in front of it.  My best guess is that it has been unopened since mid-2005

That was about the time the VCR died and also when I got my first iPod. These are just some of our VHS tapes. I think I gave most of them away. It’s about half our CD collection. We have another one of these towers somewhere….(i’d assumed it was in the junk room with this one, but apparently not).

When I go the iPod I had no real concept of how much space 4GB is, how many songs that actually was, so I only copied off the songs I really liked from the CDs. Now I have a 40GB Zen and can convert the CD tracks to MP3s so my next project (after I get the junk room done) is to burn all this music to my computer.

Maybe I’ll let DH tackle that one.

Ancient technology

This is an unretouched photo of a 5.25” floppy disk I unearthed while cleaning the junk closet. 

It holds 1.2MB of storage.

That’s not even enough to store the full sized photo of itself.

I think it is blank because there is no label on it. But we’ll never know for sure because no one I know has a drive capable of reading it. I last had a drive capable of reading it in 1996.

Yeah, I’ve been hanging on to a possibly blank disc I have no way of reading for almost 13 years.

I’m thinking I might start calling the junk closet my “antique closet”.

Someday, far in the future my technologically advanced descendants will find it and wonder what secrets I might have left behind on the unreadable mystery disk. 

Obviously, not photos.

ACHOO!

Sorry about that.

I've been reorganizing the 'office' aka junk storage room and it's been a couple years since we've really done any serious cleaning out in that room

ACHOO!

So it's dusty and I am allergic to dust.

Yesterday was Imbolc. The first of the spring/renewal festivals, a celebration of the growing light. But it is also midwinter. We are 6 weeks past the Winter Solstice and have 6 more weeks until the Spring Equinox.  I am very fond of Imbolc because it quite literally means light is starting to return to my life. Due to the positioning of my house, I don’t get much direct sunlight in my windows from Yule to Imbolc. The light hits the windows about 3:45 and starts sliding back by 5. Imbolc means the soon the bricks might get enough sun to hold some warmth & the house won’t be so chilly.

It’s also when I get a start on my spring cleaning. Once spring really is showing oustide, I want to be outside cleaning. I need to get the inside stuff done before then.

The junk room is a little room I used for my quilting and as a library back in our childfree days. It's closet was full of built in shelves and it made a handy storage spot. Then we had kids and things started piling up. Thing we needed but not frequently like the double stroller. They got put in the office, piling up in front of the closet. Random pieces of spare furniture were shoved in this room - small occasional tables, a small desk, a set of kiddie table & chairs and lots of sets of plastic drawers that were collapsing under the weight of things shoved in them.

We pushed some of the stuff around a couple years ago when we had a yard sale, but the things that didn't sell went back in the closet or the stacked in the room waiting 'to be given away'.

Some things in that closet haven't seen the light of day in 6 years.

Last Saturday I went through the plastic drawers & filled a huge garbage with stuff & tossed the drawers in a 'dump' pile on the porch. Last Sunday DH moved the furniture out to the storage trailer and we went through the rest of the stuff, including the closet.  I wish I had taken 'before' photos. We now have 4 more bags of trash, a huge pile of things were add to the burn pile and the pile for the dump is easily the size of 2 trash bags.

So now I have this

which is the stuff we are keeping. You can see there are books against the back wall. My goal is to someday actually be able to TOUCH those books.

And we have this

which is the now nearly empty closet. That enclosed area was our gun safe for the first 6 years we lived here. Then it was home to random small kitchen appliances we intended to give to somebody or other. It has a heavy wood panel with a deadbolt as a door. I'm going to keep wrapping paper and gifts I don't want the boys to find in there. The closet itself hadn't been opened in over 2 years before today. The dust is unbelievable!

And apparently I never vacuumed up the sawdust from when DH put the gun safe in 11 years ago because it is all over the carpet in there.

Everyone has been underfoot all last week so I’ve gotten little done. The plan is the next few days will be spent going through all the remaining stuff, plus my fabric and yard stashes and then tackling the bookshelves themselves. I'm sure I'll have a few boxes of stuff to donate to the library.

And a lot of showers. All the dust I am stirring up has made it almost impossible for me to breathe

So if you don't hear from me this week I'm either waist deep in purging my stuff or laid out from Benedryl.

Weekly Winners – week 5

Monday was Mayhem’s birthday.  He asked for cupcakes with lots of sprinkles

One of his gifts was a pop up book called Encyclopedia Prehistorica

All the dinos had to come & see it

We finally had some snow

I’ve been cleaning out our junk closet & found some ancient technology

I also bought some new technology

 

For more weekly winners please visit Lotus at Sarcastic Mom