Home Work

The last week and a half has been devoted to, among other things, cleaning the house(!). This so-called cleaning is long past being long overdue - by about twenty-five years or so. But this is not to say that, after this week and a half, the place is now clean. This isn't even to say that the place is now cleaner. It's just that there is now slightly (not to be confused with "noticeably") less junk stuffed into this very old, very tiny, storage locker we like to call "home".

I took twenty-eight bags of trash to the dump the other day. If you were to look at our house, you would probably think, "Wait. Did he say he got rid of twenty-eight bags of trash - or did he say he brought home twenty-eight bags of trash?" It's that bad. Still.

While this house "cleaning" has been a little intense, it's also been a little spotty (think of a dog with mange). But at least the house is twenty-eight bags of junk lighter. I just wish the weight loss would show. Still, we didn't put it on overnight. We're not going to take if off overnight.

It would be nice if this pandemic wasn't around. Under so-called normal conditions, we could at least have a tag sale with some of this still-not-tossed-out junk. Instead, we're saving the stuff we want to tag sale for that possible moment in the probably distant future when a tag sale may once again be possible.

This means we now have at least three classifications of junk in and around our house: 1) Junk we may want to tag sale so we'll hang onto it until we can have one - and then possibly throw it out after, maybe (3% of our junk). 2) Junk we may possibly want to throw out - tag sale or not (.01% of our junk). And 3) All the other junk we have which we have no idea why we have it, what it's for, or in some cases, even what it is - but we know it's valuable, or possibly useful - so don't touch it - or else (96.99% of our junk). 

(By the way, "Junk" might be a little harsh. Many years ago, I made a comment about all the junk in our house and my Aunt Ellie said, in her usual dry and pointed manner, "How do you define 'Junk'?" My response was, "Anything that's not mine." I still hold to this but I'll try to use the more socially acceptable "stuff" instead - purely out of respect to Aunt Ellie, not out of respect to the truth or anything like that.)

 

 

So the cleaning and sorting continues. At least for now. 

 

One of Sam's jobs during this traumatic ordeal has been to take any of the seemingly endless amount of toy tubs - and sort them one-by-one. These new Sam-sorted categories (not to be confused with the categories above) are: 1) Toys I (Sam) want to keep. 2) Toys I (Sam) want to sell (in the Tag Sale of the Future). 3) Toys that may or may not be mine, or may or may not be Jake's - but he needs to look at

them and decide who they belong to and what to do about it. And 4) LEGOs. LEGOs is by far the largest category.

Sam has now sorted through an unknown amount of these tubs, to the point where we have two three MASSIVE tubs filled with nothing but LEGOs - and there are many more unsorted tubs to go. If my house someday sinks into the ground, it will be due in no small part to the weight of an infinite amount of LEGOs.

I saw a news story about a year or two back about LEGO collectors and how some people pay a lot of money for certain ones of these little blocks. At the time, I though this was pretty neat. Now, with tens of thousands of these things sitting in tubs all over my house, I'm thinking it's either pretty neat - or pretty crazy. Who has the patience to sort through tens of thousands of these things, looking for that one tiny little block which may or may not be worth something?

I don't know the answer, but I'm thinking either Jake and Sam might be a possibility.