Welcome back!  It is Sunday, March 23.  There are only 277 days until Christmas.  I can’t wait until Labor Day passes so I can start decorating the house.  Today we observe the birthdays of Frederik Ruysch, Fannie Farmer and David Ford.  On this day in 1743 Handel’s oratorio “Messiah” premiered in London, in 1891 the first jazz concert was held at Carnegie Hall and in 1972 Evil Knievel broke 93 bones after successfully clearing 35 cars (although I don’t know if I would call it successful with 93 broken bones).  It is Memorial Day in Bolivia, Independence Day in Lithuania and World Meteorological Day world-wide.

Last week, when I was posting my blog, I happened to look at the stats for the previous week.  I noticed that three people had looked at it in Russia and one person in China.  I have to say that I was surprised by that.  Does it automatically translate into the language of the person viewing it or does that person need to understand English to be able to read it?  I am also curious to know how these people came to know about my blog.  Did they go to it intentionally?  Did they Google “inane rambling” and my blog popped up?  Just curious.  If you are from out-of-country and reading this, please comment to let me know how you came upon it and what you think.  Don’t be afraid to be negative.  It will give me something to talk about next week.

We recently began the task of cleaning out my parents’ house.  You would not believe the job we have embarked on.  Keep in mind that my parents moved into that house around 1949, so they had plenty of time to fill it with “good stuff.”  To begin the chore, I had a dumpster put into the driveway.  The dumpster is 8 feet wide and 22 feet long.  I am guessing, but I think it is at least 6 feet deep (probably more).  

My brother Jack and I started on Monday.  He was upstairs in one of the bedrooms.  I worked outside cleaning out under the back porch.  It took me over three hours to get all the junk out from under that porch.  I think that, based on the back porch, the basement and the bedrooms alone, that house could have been one of those reality shows on hoarding.  Jack found text books my father used when he was in college.  I do not know what he was saving them for, but I am pretty sure that by the time he had gotten out of the service they were out of date.

When we were kids, way back in the days of black and white TV (by the way, I hate the phrase back in the day), my father used to put up scaffolding around the house so that he could paint it.  Just for those who are interested, this was quite a chore.  First he used a torch to burn and scrape off the old paint and then he would repaint the side he had cleared.  As you can imagine, this was not a one weekend task.  … but I digress

The reason I bring this up is because some of the wood I pulled out from under the porch was used to build that scaffolding.  Once he had the house vinyl sided, I would have thought that that wood could have come out and been disposed of.  But no-o-o-o!  He saved it.  Why?  Who knows.  He had no plan for it and no need for it.  We did not have a huge stand of trees so we could not expect to build a tree house.  It wasn’t like he was going to use it to prop the house up in the event of a tornado striking it.  It was just that you never got rid of things “because you never knew when you might need them.”

My brother Tom claims that my father has tubes for making dynamite stored in the basement.  I guess he either expected to come under attack and wanted to be ready, or thought making explosives would be a good way to pass the time, if he ever finished painting the house.  We found shirts that were still in their original packaging.  Based on some of the stuff he wore, those should have been opened years ago.  Of course my brother Tom, who still lives in the house, continued in my father’s footsteps and amassed a rather sizable pile of, for lack of a better term, crap in the house.  We tossed several old, outdated computers and TV’s.  The back porch was loaded with junk that should have been tossed years ago.

Anyway, as I said earlier, we started on Monday.  By Wednesday, we had basically run out of room in the dumpster.  We were having that one pulled out and another one delivered.  We estimate that it will take at least four dumpsters altogether to get rid of all the junk in the house (no we are not making Tom get in the dumpster).  The key word here is junk.  There are some things that may or may not have value, but it is going to take time to unearth them. 

 

There are places in that house that I am not sure I want to venture into.  The basement is an example of that.  My father has stuff down there that was close to useless when he got it.  When his father died, he cleaned out that basement and brought the stuff to our house where it has languished since.  I am sure that if you go by my parents’ grave the day we start throwing that stuff out, you will be able to hear the noise he will make as he starts spinning.

One result of this major chore is that the lovely Elaine has already started making plans to divest our house of things so that we do not burden ourselves when the time comes for us to move.  She is of the opinion that we need to start going minimalist.  It will be less to pack, less to dust and less to get rid of later.  I try to keep myself dusted so that I can move to the new house when we go.

In the end we will empty my parents’ house, sell it and move on.  We will take our memories of the good times we had there with us, because they are the things that can never be thrown away.  The rest is just the detritus of the past.

This week our fact tells us that a female ferret will die if it goes into heat and cannot find a mate.  That should not be a problem, though.  All she has to do is go by a ferret high school and the teenage ferret boys will be glad to help out.