Oh Happy Days!

Have you ever felt so happy and light-hearted that you keep looking behind you to see if you’re farting rainbows and puppy dogs? Me neither but I came close today. The euphoric lift in my caboose might not have come from leaving a trail of puppies in my wake but I swear there’s a rainbow following me around and before you ask, it smells just like wet grass and cotton candy---strawberry cotton candy and good old, Kentucky bluegrass. To be honest the scent in the air is probably coming from the neighbor who is mowing his lawn and I have a Dutch Rusk smeared with strawberry jam sitting next to my keyboard. Ya, in my world I have the super powers of a five year old girl. If a rabbit was in my view right now my imagination would turn him into a unicorn. That said, I just used 148 words of my 1,000 word quota to convey that I’m having a great day.

What brought on this happy mood? Simple. Yesterday the son-I-wish-I-had spent a couple of hours helping me clean my garage and now there is nothing left out there to purge before I get the house whipped into shape for the listing. When Tim drove off with his trailer loaded with my stuff he also took a lot of my stress with him. What was in the trailer? He took---bought actually---five large metal cabinets that filled up one wall; three large boxes of e-Bay shipping supplies (he does e-Bay too); five long tables from the days when Don and I were vendors at swap meets (four more will go later on); a snow blower plus driveway salt and snow shovels; two vintage 20 gallon metal ice cream drums that I was using to hold tools with long handles; an assortment of tools like a roof rake, shovels and gardening tools; a box of wood scraps; and several full sheets of Masonite that I used to create a ‘bull pen’ for my shipping activities.

There were things in that load Tim hauled away that I could have tried to sell on Facebook Marketplace like the snow blower but even though it was in mint condition I figured no one would buy it this time of the year, however the e-Bay supplies would have been an easy sale. But I screwed up with the vintage ice cream drums. I should have looked up their value before giving them to Tim who, by the way, was elated to get them. He said he’s wanted them for years and I realized too late that I lost an opportunity for a $100 barter. It’s what we do. We barter and with the move coming up I’m going to be on the bottom side of our little game. Still, it turned out great this week. He moved a bird bath in the yard for better drive-by appeal, helped me in the garage, was great company and at the end I owed him $100 for his labor and he owed me $125 for the cabinets and $12 for twelve Rubbermaid boxes. (I've probably got 40 more empty Rubbermaid boxes to clean up and use for packing up the house for the move, after which Tim is barter/buying them all.)

The garage is only 90% ready for photo day but it makes sense as a garage again. I could park four small cars in there now or a RV and two cars. A 24 foot sail boat would fit or a pop-up van with a wheelchair lift and ramp like we had in the oversized space. There’s more square footage in that garage than in the place I'm moving into. One guy who came to pick up a Marketplace purchase took one look at the vaulted ceiling, showroom lighting and finished wall with miles of pegboard and said, “Wow! I could live in this garage!”  In other words, it’s a guy’s dream garage which I’m hoping will help sell the house because the kitchen is not a woman's dream kitchen. It's too small by today's standards and not an inch of granite or stainless steal to be seen.

When my husband was alive 2/3 of the garage was his show-and-tell space for his Classic Corvette and all his gas & oil collectibles---restored gas pumps from the 1920s, porcelain signs, tall glass oil bottles and metal cans. We also had a showcase of “smalls” which in gas & oil collector’s circles means we had everything that gas stations once gave away for promotionals. We specialized in Smalls when we had booths in several antique malls and would do swap meets out of state in the summers.

In the first two summers after Don died, Tim and I systematically e-Bayed all of Don’s collection. Tim sold the pumps, globes, larger signs---things we knew would sell for big bucks---and I sold the rest. We did it that way because he was taking a 30% commission out of anything he sold and with cheaper things it wasn’t worth his effort. Paying him that 30% was well worth it because he covered the e-Bay fees and handled all the shipping and pickups which was no small feat to arrange on those old gas pumps and globes. Those two summers our e-Bay accounts were both going hot and heavy. And now, for the first time since I’ve lived here, my garage is just a garage. OH HAPPY DAYS!

The photo below is of the one-piece, hand painted Musgo gas globe and it was Don's pride and joy. When he first offered $5,000 for it and let the seller work him up the $7,000 I thought they were both crazy. But fast forward 15 years and his investment sold for $20,000 (minus Tim's $2,000 broker's fee for arranging the private sale to another collector) which in turn helped me pay off my mortgage early. Now, there are three piece reproductions on the market which always drives the prices down on the originals. I sold it at the right time. I've always hated having large sums of money invested in breakable antiques and I was glad to get the Musgo out of the house, having once broke a $4,000 globe just packing it up to take to swap meet. My husband wasn't even mad. "Why aren't you yelling at me?" I asked. "Why should I?" he replied, "You feel bad enough for both of us."

All traces of its former uses are gone from my garage and my life is about to change, leaving behind my wheeling and dealing memories. And there are a lot of memories involved. My husband was the up-front man who bought and sold the stuff but I'm the one who worked behind the scenes cleaning, polishing and pricing it all. I'm the one who did the packing and unpacking for shows and the mall restocking and who single-handedly hung it all in our garage after Don's stroke, then I e-Bayed it after he died not to mention I was with him when he bought most of that stuff. 

Now, I'm looking forward to getting re-acquainted with that five year old girl who lives inside of me and who wants nothing more than to pretend I'm about to move into a tiny cottage near a lake where I'll be free to paint and write all day long, occasionally looking over my shoulder to see if I'm leaving a trail of rainbows and puppy dogs in my wake. ©

Photo Notes: The top photo is of one wall as it looked when my husband was a live but I can't find a digital photo of the wall of the gas pumps and globes, and I don't have the time to deal with finding a print copy to scan. The center photo is of my husband (in the wheelchair) and a good friend (to the left) and his friend's brother who is standing in front of the showcase of Smalls.

Pulling Teeth, Broken Toes and other Tiny Things

My dining room table is a hot mess. It’s covered with tiny stuff in piles of like tiny stuff waiting to get photographed for wholesale lots to sell on eBay. Along with the tiny stuff are tiny plastic zip lock bags in sizes from a half inch square to three by four inches. I don’t know how other people ship their smalls after selling a lot but I put mine in bags because: 1) I have them left over from the days when we used to sell smalls at our antique mall booths; 2) In bags the items are less likely to damage one another during shipping, and 3) It makes a better impression when the high bidder opens their box to have things all ready to price and hang in an antique booth, thus they are more likely to give me good feedback. eBay sellers live for good feedback. 

After putting together 20 to 30 like smalls and laying them out to photograph they are put in the zip lock bags then into a box or bubble envelope to get weighed. To list items you have to feed the package weight and size into the e-Bay software. It’s a lot of work but what choice do I have? Donating smalls to Goodwill would be like throwing money out the window of a moving car. And they probably wouldn't recognize charms given away at the 1937 World’s Fair or premiums from old time radio shows and cereal boxes or Victorian memorial 'hair rings' nor would they recognize a highly prized cigarette lighter like one I just sold on eBay for over $400 or a 1929 patent pending Walt Disney tiny creation worth a couple of hundred. Knowledge is power but it can also be a burden. The local auction house isn’t a good place to send smalls either because they allow people to walk around the building to look at stuff in the week prior to the auctions and all the valuable smalls would (and do) get pillaged out the lots.

My garage is also a hot mess. I’ve been putting stuff from inside the house out there to take to the auction house in the spring and while I should be keeping a running inventory list as I go, I haven’t been doing it. Why? Because I keep changing my mind between what goes in a Goodwill box and what goes in the auction. And once in a while I’ll even bring something back in the house to put it in my once beautiful library where eBay Center has trashed my library with the stuff waiting in various stages in the listing process. But right now I’m concentrating on emptying out a large glass showcase in that room so it can get sold next summer which is where the smalls on my dining room table have been living for the past twenty years. I've done the math and figure over the next nine months if I keep the pressure on myself I'll be able to have 360 more e-Bay auctions and that should put me in good shape. Kaput. Finished. Out of the collectibles marketplace for the first time in sixty years. Then I'll work on selling art and furniture.

New topic: I broke my middle toe. I accidentally tripped on the bathroom scales and if you don’t already know it, let me be the first to tell you that bathrooms scales are evil. Not only are they nasty liars they also mock you, then they trip you and break your bones. The first day it happened I could barely walk and didn’t want to but I had places to go and things I had to do like get a haircut and buy the dog a few necessities. When I got home I iced my toe down, took a Meloxicam which, I’m told, is just a juiced up Motrin. It’s a prescription for arm pain from my failed elbow surgery for when I over do using my arm but I figured that the Meloxicam could find its way down to the toe. And it did. My toe is quite red below (not to be confused with under) the nailbed but the blues on the rest of the toe have faded some. Dr. Google sent me to Amazon to get some broken toe wraps for support and they’ll be here tomorrow.

Writing this blog entry today is like pulling teeth. So far I’ve only written 657 words and I’ve got nothing left floating around inside my head to share. I strive to keep my blogs between 900 to a 1,000 words and usually I’m struggling to edit out sections because I tend to run long with the first draft. Not today. Today I’m struggling to write my quota so I can leave the keyboard. By the way, “like pulling teeth” is an idiom that’s been around since the 1830s---before modern dentistry---that now describes something that is tedious and tiring to do. But in my family it was more than an idiom. Enter my dad and his handy dandy pair of pliers. He was in charge of that chore---literally---and I’m not talking about baby teeth that were about to fall out although I do vaguely remember him helping one or two of those out of my brother's and my head. My grandfather lived with my family for a while and he’d never been to a dentist and wasn’t about to start in his old age. So it fell to my dad to do the deed of pulling teeth that were too painful to stay in my grandfather’s mouth. I don’t know if there was a bottle of whiskey involved in the process but it wouldn’t surprise me. And with that last sentence completed I now have 895 words which means I’m going to make my minimum quota with a few words left over to spare and I’m out of here! The grocery store is calling my name. ©

The Downsizing Saga - Chapter Four

My life is rolling along at a pretty good clip now that fall is here. All my biannual doctor appointments are coming up, plus the yard and car both take time up with biannual maintenance. Then there is the Big Purge that has taken over my life. I just sent my fourth load of stuff off to the auction house which included a ton of tools. As Tim---the son-I-wish-I had---said, “Don didn’t buy cheap tools so these should bring good money.” And they did. I sold Don’s stainless steel tool cart to Tim and that’s gone too. So far neither one of us has laid out any cash to the other; he works at $35 an hour but he’s been buying stuff at about the same rate. Fine by me. 

He spied a glass canister set today on my Hoosier cabinet (circa 1900) that he wanted and I told him I’d barter it for vintage zinc topped canning jars, which in his line of business he finds all the time. Ever since I visited Dawn’s blog and saw all the neat things she displays in canning jars I’ve been lusting after a couple to display my Cracker Jack plastic and metal toys in. I’ve already got collectible marbles inside a few zinc topped jars that I’m taking with me when I move but I’ll have room for a few more. I also have a collection of wooden nickels that I’ll put in a jar. When little kids come over they always want to take some nickels home and while most aren’t worth more than a buck I have an even hundred with no duplicates and I want to keep it that way. A jar of wooden nickels instead of on a tray will keep the pilfering at bay.

This may be my last lot of stuff to go to the auction house---at least to this, no reserve auction house---because all the junkier stuff is now gone from the basement and garage and the good stuff won’t be sold there if I can help it. Although I can't complain about the bidding war the auction house had on my 1976 bottle of bourbon. It closed at $228. Next up for the Tim and Jean Dream Team is making a list of all the art in the house and start the research on where to sell it. That will be his job. Why? Because if he wants to branch out his business to include helping people downsize and he’ll need to know how to deal with all aspects of what he might run across in homes. And the timing is right because Tim’s heart surgery happened this week and he’ll have to take it easy for the next two weeks.

I’ve also job assigned him the project of putting my ice cream parlor cash register (circa 1906) back together so we can e-Bay it. One day I came home to find my husband had taken the sales counter on it apart for reasons I still don’t know but being he only had the use of one arm/hand he couldn’t get it back together. Boy, was I mad! I put all the screws in a pill bottle, put the bottle in the drawer of the cash register, closed the lid that hid the counter and I forgot about his misdeed until I decided to sell it. Tim thinks my husband wanted to clean the counter because it was the only part of the register that wasn’t shiny and that might be true. I bought that cash register in the ‘60s and one year in the ‘70s for a birthday gift Don kidnapped it and sent it off to Chicago to have the brass re-plated.

After the cash register came back it looked so good Don didn’t want to give it back and it sat in his office a couple of months until I pitched a fit and made him put it in a place of honor in the living room. I adore that piece but I don’t want anything decorative in my next place that I can’t lift. Still, I love the memories attached to that cash register including how my dad couldn’t walk past it without pressing the ‘no sale’ key and putting a quarter inside. I feel awful that I didn’t take a photo of it as it sat by the door leading into my library. Tim took it to his house so I’ll have to wait until he lists it and then I’ll nab a copy of his listing photo.

I did take a photo of one of six bookshelves in my library (above) before I started a selling friendzy of the black bug boxes. They aren't filled with mounted bugs but the nickname comes from the Victorian era when this style display box were first made for the then popular hobby. Mine are/were fulled of small stuff like union pins, political pinbacks, stick pins, watch fobs, metal oil change reminders, WWII photo ID badges, service awards, fountain pens, mechanical pencils, Moose Lodge and military insignias, etc., etc. A different collection is in each box. My husband had an eye for finding this kind of stuff but it wasn’t until after his stroke and we moved into our new house that we spent evenings cleaning and sorting them into any kind of order and I mounted them in display boxes. Like the maps I finished up selling a few weeks ago, I’ve been feeding these boxes to e-Bay a few at a time.

And thus you’ve just read another chapter in The Downsizing Saga book I seem to be writing in my blog. Will I finish in time for the move? Will there be a conflict three-fourths of the way through the process to be resolved before the final chapter? Only the Shadow knows... and if you're under 70 you probably won't get that 'shadow' reference. I'm barely old enough to remember The Shadow radio series, but it's something my husband and I said to one another on occasion when an answer was unknowable. ©

bug box

Ants and Ancient Things

I’ve been invaded by tiny ants, or rather I should say the dog’s feeding area has been invaded. (Although in the process of killing them I found one crawling on my elbow!) It’s the second time this summer they’ve done that and I’m running out of new locations to put Levi’s food and water. This time I had to throw out the contents of his self-feeder---about three pounds of kibble. Hint: when your dog doesn’t want to eat, put your glasses on and look for ants. I don’t have any indoors ant spray because I’m guessing it’s not safe for Levi, so I used Lysol All Purpose Spray which I’m sure is just as toxic to dogs as ant spray but at least your floors get cleaner in the process of mass murdering the devil ants. Why is it that I still feel bad about killing a firefly last week but I have no sympathy for the ant carcass I just smeared all over the floor with the bottom of my shoe? He was a little scout, I presume, looking for his dead buddies that died by Lysol to drag them back to their nest to mourn or feed to his queen. Good luck with that, I wiped at least a hundred of them up with wet paper towels. I’ve seen ants carry off their dead but I made up the part about feeding them to their queen. But it sounds logical to me. It’s a cruel, hard world out there.

I’m struggling to write about something that doesn’t include the 'D' word in it. If you’ve been following my blog you’ll know which 'D' word I’m talking about. If not, I’ll give you a hint: It involves moving to a smaller home. I’ve only been at it for a month and I’ve come to the conclusion that this time around it feels different, more joyful. And I’ve further concluded that the joy is coming from a place where I have an exciting goal I’m working towards and not a painful experience driving me forward. I’ve only done the 'D' work twice in my life. Once after my husband’s stroke and once after he died. The first done under extremely stressful conditions, the second under a veil of sadness, tears falling like rain drops from Eeyore's cloud. Both times I was saying goodbye not only to things but to our whole way of life and saying hello to an unknown and murky future. However, I’m doing the 'D' work now because I will be moving on to life style that will come with very few responsibilities and I’ll be able to do my favorite things without the guilt of thinking I should be doing something else. I intend to be that quirky woman in the complex who paints and writes and knits and does the most complicated jigsaw puzzles on the planet---yes, the two-side puzzles, same picture on both side only slightly different view. My favorite one being a photograph of a pile of yellow No. 2 pencils.

I still haven’t decided if I’m going to take any quilting supplies with me but I’ve been thinking I should make one more quilt before I die. I don’t do them by machine so a box of ‘quarters’---quilters will know what those are---won’t take up much room. That box of fabric and a few quilters’ rulers, maybe some books of patterns and oh crap! I’ll need scissors and needles and thread, of my! How much hobby stuff can one fit in an eight foot long closet in my future den/hobby room and still have room for out-of-season coats? 

After my three day marathon of working in the garage and making great progress I took Saturday off to go to Goodwill, recycling and the grocery store and to stop by the pet store for more kibble. As fortunate would have it, I had a $15 rewards coupon so the dog food was nearly free which just goes to prove there is balance in the universe…the ants taketh away, the coupon giveth back. 

But before my afternoon trip to run the above errands I literally spent the morning trying to identify the above object and when Google images can’t ID something, you know you’ve got something rare. I once had a magazine article written about that very object but do you think I can remember what it said or where I put it or even if I kept it? Heck no! It’s a primitive lock---the tail/key comes out---but knowing for sure if it’s Roman or whatever can make the difference between e-Baying it for pocket change or hundreds. I’d donate it to a museum but I’d have to research museums to know which one exhibits that sort of thing which brings me right back to having to ID than dang thing first. It occurs to me that I really do have a lot of obscure information in my head; is it any wonder some of it falls out from time to time? With my last downsizing I donated a large oil and grease chart for a 1905 Reo Motor Car that I matted and framed like it was fine art for one of my husband’s birthdays and the car museum was happy to get it. It’s hanging in their research library where people who are restoring antique cars come to play. Sometimes giving something away feels great.

My house cleaner is coming today and I’ll go to my last book club tomorrow followed by a lunch date on Saturday with a very old friend, so I can almost promise, positively (well maybe) that the 'D' word won’t come up in my next post or two. But be forewarned, my husband didn’t nickname me "One Track Jean" for nothing. ©