It's Not the Heat...

... it's the house full of 45 years of stuff.

Are you a fan of George Carlin? The last few days I have been living the line: "Did you ever notice that your shit is stuff and their stuff is shit?" We have a couple of rooms right now that look like we're candidates for the TV show Hoarders.

It rained all night last night and kept me up. I think I fell asleep just before five am. Made for a rough morning.

The "To-Did":

1. Email to the attorney
2. Emailed a family friend about disposal of prescription drugs
   
3. Email to the GC. I think it's likely he doesn't really use email, but it was on his card so I thought I would try. I looked through his bid and although the price keeps going up, he missed two items on my list. I let him know.
4. Went to pay a bill I've been carrying around for two weeks.
5. Went to buy more Banker's boxes. As it turns out, if you buy Banker's boxes at Staples, 10 at a time, they don't cost all that much more than other boxes. I bought them because I've decided to just transfer the contents of the file cabinets and take everything rather than go through it now. Maybe I'll do it some day I'm snowed in back in Pittsburgh.
6. Spent some time breaking down trash and moving it to the curb for a pickup at the end of next week. I hope my neighbors don't wind up hating me. Because of this item, BTW, I would up spending the whole day with plexi-shards in my shirt.
7. Consolidated items in the garage to make room for "sort-and-purge" operations.
8. Made up a bunch of boxes.
   
9. Cleaned up a small disaster in the basement.
10. Sorted through, I kid you not, maybe 500 books. Probably about 450 of them are going to the HP Library tomorrow, I hope.
11. Made what is I think becoming a daily run to Goodwill. Did you know Goodwill has an online receipt generator?
12. Put together one bag of trash from the items that appeared while I was on the road.
    
13. Arranged a play-date with one of my Dad's former colleagues. He's coming tomorrow to pick up teaching materials.
14. One more email to the attorney.
    

It feels like the next two days are going to be critical. Tomorrow seems like it might be the absolute biggest single push. If you are in town and can come help - tomorrow (Sunday) is the day. It looks like my sister and her family are going to head East on Tuesday, I think.

There haven't been any pictures so far. Really it never feels like there's much that merits photographing. But just so you can get a feel for the next two days, here's the family room:


which actually looks a little better today than it did yesterday. Then here's the garage:


which is daunting.

Here's a more spiritual photo to maybe give some of the other dimensions to this process:


When I was in maybe sixth grade my friend Carl and I became enamored with David Macaulay's "City." We made a replica city of Rome out of clay in my basement. Mostly is was just a model Colosseum and theatre - after that we sort of ran out of ideas and information. It was however possible to reach the ceiling from the table, which was plenty enough excuse for handprints.