It's Official......

Every so often---and probably more often than you’d like---going forward I’m going to do a progress report highlighting a recent downsizing project or backsliding. (Heaven help me if that happens)! Writing it down for the world to see is accountability to keep me on track, and because I’ve spent all but the first ten years of life recording my life, I am driven from within to keep on doing so. Which reminds me, I really need to get my old diaries out, and set the box next to my La-Z-Boy so I can start going through them in the evenings. No rest for the wicked in this house. Twice in the past five years I’ve set out to do one finally reading and then destroy those old journals, but I get side-tracked getting to know my younger self all over again. My second oldest diaries is filled with movie hand-bills. Remember those? They were small pieces of paper that you’d get at the theaters or grocery store advertising upcoming movies. Blackboard Jungle, Rock Around the Clock…I saw all the old classics back then. But of course those films weren’t classics the first time around.

Anyway, for my first “Downsizing Update” I accomplished the following: My friend Tim came over and we loaded up his trailer with my antique, metal patio furniture---no more spray painting every five years! Can I hear a hip, hip hooray for that? Also loaded on the truck was an expensive Schwinn Airdyne exercise bike that I’ve been using to hang a bag to collect pop cans for recycling---that was a mistake, they sell new for $700 and I should have tried to sell the bike for a fixed price first before sending to the auction house where I’m guessing it will go for under $40. Also on that load were 8 folding chairs only used twice, 3 office chairs I quit using for reasons I’ve forgotten but I couldn’t fit them in my car to donate, a garden cart, a couple of boxes of flower pots and trellises and other things so unimportant I've already forgotten but the trailer was full when it left. Among the junky, junk was a box of small antiques like a pair of three wheeled, clamp-on roller skates from the 1800s---Big wheels, 6 inches across! I’ve wanted to clean the skates up and bring them inside for decades but I haven’t so now someone else gets the chore/dream of what a neat conversation piece they are if only you could touch them without getting your fingers greasy. 

Also accomplished this week: I made my quota of ten e-Bay auctions and the sleeper item was a pair of cowboy spurs that are up to $300 and will probably close around $500. I knew when I did some research on them that they’d bring on a bidding war because they are stamped with the name of a famous spur maker, circa 1900. My pair has a broken piece of bling on them and if not for that they’d be worth $2,000, give or take a hundred. I was shocked when sat at computer screen learning about the guy and his famous spurs and I wondered if my husband knew that. He probably did. He spent a lot of time reading and researching thus he was an educated picker. Well, most of the time. He once bought a fine china tea pot with a 1930's style gas station logo on it for $400 but I was lucky to get $100 bid on it. Oh well, at least it didn’t end up at the Salvation Army and the guy who "adopted" it was happy. Neither one of us had ever seen another like it.

My oldest niece came into town the same day Tim was here, to see if any of the stuff that belonged to my mom was anything she wanted before it disappears from my house. They probably met in passing 20 years ago but I’ve wanted them to meet again. She’s got this calm, in control personality that came from being a special ED teacher for 16 years and Tim has an off the wall personality that makes you think he’d hang upside down from the chandeliers if he thought it would make you laugh. 

I have a collection of buttons (both mine and my mom’s) that my niece was particularly interested in seeing because part of that collection came from her mother who got the buttons from her grandmother and from going door-to-door asking for buttons. She gave them to my mom when she was still dating my brother. Button collecting peaked many decades ago. Back then they were like baseball cards, you traded and tried to get one of every type and color of button manufactured and the Baby Ruth’s of the button world were the handmade scenic and portraits buttons. But unfortunately, back when my mom was hot and heavy into buttons the cards of buttons my niece’s mom assembled apparently got un-assembled and now they’re lost forever in a mix that will be sold by the pound on e-Bay. But first I’m thinking of finding two small jars and filling them up for my nieces with a note that the jars represent a hobby that entertained four generations of women in the family. Marie Kondo would tell me to say “thank you” to the 24.8 pounds of buttons and throw them out. Obviously I’m not there yet. ©