My Second OFFICIAL Downsizing Report

If you’ve ever cleaned out a house of an elderly person and wondered why on earth they accumulated so many of a certain item when a couple of them would have been enough, you’ll know how shocked I was to discover that I had over 25 bird feeders tucked away in my Three stall garage. They were sent to the local auction house to sell in three lots. There were ones so big that once they were filled with seed, I couldn’t lift them, ones a good wind would dump all the seeds on the ground and ones the chipmunks could crawl right inside and make themselves at home. The feeder experiments/war was ongoing for a lot of years and it gave us great pleasure to think we could outsmart nature if only we had a different style bird feeder. Color me embarrassed to have kept them all.

I’m still making my self-imposed quota of ten e-Bay auctions a week which might not sound like much but do the math. Ten a week times 52 weeks amounts to 520 collectibles over the next year, 490 in my case because I don’t do e-Bay between the holidays. That should put me in super great shape in the collectibles department. Done. Gone. Off to their new homes with my blessings. Ten is also all I can handle and do it right. The research is time consuming, photographing and writing up descriptions is time consuming. Packing is time consuming. Life is time consuming. But in most cases I'm glad to pass the collector’s torch on to guys like the high bidder on my pair of 1899 Cobb Bean handcuffs. He was thrilled to find something he'd been looking for since he was a kid and saw Houdini put on a pair. He e-mailed me that he was able to pick the lock and get them open. How cool is that!

Speaking of passing the torch, I gave my oldest niece the original wallet and papers that my grandfather immigrated with and carried on him every day of his life in America. She was properly in awe holding them in her hands. She’d seen copies of them in the family history book I wrote, but it’s different seeing an actual Italian Army discharge paper dated 1896, a U.S. Citizenship paper from 1898 and a Coal Miner’s License from 1916 and knowing that the five generations between my grandfather and my great-great nieces and nephews are all here because he had the guts to travel the ocean with one wicker suitcase and a dream of a better life. I gave that suitcase to my niece last summer and the papers will go inside where she has it displayed on top of a china cabinet. Once a teacher, always a teacher; she will make sure the little ones in the family hear the story of one of their ancestors when they visit the cottage in the years to come. 

I even gave away my geode rock that I've been carrying around since I was fifteen. My niece is giving it a place of honor in with her collection of travel rocks. The poor thing hasn't 'lived' outside since I brought it home from Indiana. It's going to miss my sun porch come winter. At least I have visiting rights and my niece has my blessings if she wants to crack it open to expose the crystals within.

This morning I dropped off a trunk load of stuff at hazardous waste recycling---paints and gardening chemicals that the son-I-wish-I-had helped me bring up from the basement yesterday. Last time he was here I dropped off three huge boxes of my husband's slides at media recycling. (Have I mentioned how much I hate going to media recycling? It's in the same smelly, busy building where people dump trash off their trailers and pickup trucks, and a frontend loader picks it up and puts it in to their large hauler trucks. It's a good place to pick up nails in your tires, too.) Several years before Don died we went through the slides and picked out the 100 best of the best---he was a prolific, amateur photographer. I had planned to convert those slides into a format to use in a photo frame slide show and recycle the others. But my husband pitched a fit about doing the latter so I never got around to doing the former. I've still got the 100 slides set aside and will drop them off to a place that can put them on a memory stick for me. Just another one of those side trips you take when you're on the Downsizing Turnpike. 

The-son-I-wish-I-had also brought up all my old artwork and art supplies for me to sort in the garage. Sorting that batch will be a long walk down Memory Lane that will fill up my trash bin a few times. There's a bunch of drawing of naked guys in that batch, just sayn'. The basement is nearly finished---just some teddy bear making supplies left that I'm not ready to part with yet and a couple of boxes of political memorabilia that I won't sell until closer to the election and, of course, we'll have to vacuum down there but not until I'm closer to listing the house. 

And for my last story from the Downsizing Front, I unpacked a box that hadn’t been unpacked since I move here nearly two decades ago and I found a framed one dollar bill, the first one I made from my bridal bouquets business. My husband’s doing. He was so supportive. He insisted that I sell him a boutonniere, then after he paid me the dollar he took it back and put it in that frame. How could you not love a guy like that? Now the dilemma. Do I sell it on e-Bay where I can get three or four bucks for that 1957 silver certificate one dollar bill or what? Maybe someday…. For now the frame got donated and the bill got tucked away where the next time I see it, it will make me feel loved all over again.  

I probably should consider renaming my blog The Downsizing Saga since they'll be more posts like this as the downsizing decisions move into the house and get more complicated, and I can hardly wait to see what makes the cut at the end of all this.  ©

The Storm Continues…

The November storm that has dumped enough snow to bury the dog and then some---a total of 24.6 inches---is still going strong. Many schools are still closed, my street is a mess with no cars in sight and already TV viewers are being advised to shovel their flat roofs so they don’t cave in. Usually, that comes much later in the season.   

I'm so cut off from the world I feel like Tom Hanks in the movie, Cast Away, only my ‘Wilson’ is trapped in the nature strip behind the house, covered with snow and probably as lonely as I am. Like Tom’s character in the movie, before the storm I caught myself talking to that ball and I even thought about drawing a face on him before I came to my sense. The powers of nature always push stray balls up my street and around my house until they get caught in the weeds or I pick them up and put them on the deck for Levi’s amusement. Over the years I’ve seen many beach and soccer balls circle my house 5 or 6 times before they get trapped in the back. It’s fascinating how the lay of the landscaping and the wind makes that happen. But I swear if a tornado is ever in the area my house will go up and Levi and I would be wandering around like Dorothy and Toto in the Wizard of Oz.

Old people seem to talk about their bird-feeders a lot so I will follow suit and share the fact that my feeders need a traffic light to keep the chickadees, finches, cardinals, titmouse, mourning doves, blue jays and woodpeckers from fighting over the prime positions. I’ve even had a huge Northern Harrier sitting on my deck rail---probably hunting for mice. What the heck is he still doing in town? He should be on his way to Central America. I’ve gone through an alarming quantity of seed this week. My feeders are just eight feet away from my door and very accessible from my deck and I suspect my neighbors aren’t able to get out to their feeders to resupply them which would explain why so many birds are dining at my house. The bummer part, though, is with my arm sling I’ve had to resort to using smaller feeders because I can’t lift my large feeders up to their hooks using just one arm. I’ve had to refill the little ones twice a day since the storm began.

I made a decision this morning to spend the afternoon reading The Hunger Games. I was probably the last person in the world to see the movie so I figured I might as well be the last person in the world to read the book. Amazon.com make decisions like that too easy to follow through. A quick download and it’s on your Kindle.  I’m not a fan of doomsday or dystopian themes in fiction where civilizations break down into factions of dominate, decadent or exploitative people who rule over the have-nots but on the other hand, I do like to understand pop culture and what makes people world-wide like to read popular stuff like The Hunger Games franchise. Snow days are good for reading if nothing else.

The snow is supposed to end during the coming night. Hopefully that will give the road crews a chance to catch up so I can get out tomorrow. If not, oh well. I won’t starve to death. Mostly what I need to do is replenish the protein mix for the diet I’ve been on. Speaking of which, I’ve lost enough weight so that I’ve had to buy a smaller pair of pants for when I leave the house and this morning I realized my pajamas are so big they are actually a trip hazard. I don’t need any more falls so they will be the first of my clothing to get purged from the closet. If I keep this up, it going to be fun in the spring when I can go shopping for a whole new wardrobe. Just think, my goal was just to get into the smallest of the three sizes already in my closet. ©