Back In the Saddle

It's been a long time. Since I've written here. Since I've written at all.

The house is empty. It's quiet. Outside it's raining and dark. So I've no excuse.

Welcome back to me.

In the immortal (maybe) words of Bugs Bunny, "Dat's all, folks" 'cause I really have nothing to say. I just wanted to get back on that horse.

It's all good.

Namaste.

I Love Power!

Sorry, this is not a get-naked blogfesssion about being a control freak. It's more elemental than that. I'm talking about the power that's delivered by National Grid to my home: the heat, the electricity, the stuff that allows my computer to run and my toilets to flush.  Sadly, it's not in my house right now, and hasn't been for 20 hours thanks to an early-winter ice storm. Happily, we were able to get (and afford) two rooms in a brand-spanking new and really nifty hotel (The Indigo Hotel) right by the Albany Airport. And how cool is this? They allow dogs - so Mobley is now an experienced elevator rider. I'm sitting here toasty warm and loving it.

There are a number of ironies, or cosmic giggles, or call-them-what-you-mays to this story. The biggest and best being that just yesterday afternoon, the basement crew finished their work on our super-high tech system to keep our basement dry. It includes a "triple-safe" sump pump complete with battery back-up. Of course, I'd scoffed at this when the salesman suggested it. Really? How often would we flood during a power outage? Who knew that it would only be a few short hours after the set-up was powered up for two such events to coincide. Okay, I admit it, I thought it would never happen - I was wrong, wrong, wrong and I'm glad for the triple-safe sump pump and promise to never even again think that it's over-the-top. When I woke up last night to realize that we didn't have power, I had to laugh to think that (because of the battery) the sump pump was the one electrical item actually at work in the house.

But, that's really not a good cosmic giggle.  That came this morning when (now that the basement is dry), Hank informed me that the roof was leaking.

Other ironies: I'd just cleaned out the pantry and have been using up the canned goods in it, thinking it's time to start fresh. So, very few cans in what's normally a pantry too packed to find anything in. I had a brief thought yesterday, "What will we eat if the lights go out?" And blissfully figured we'd eat the frozen entrees I have. Hmm, frozen entrees eaten frozen, when one is freezing. Strike that. I've also kept gallons of water for an emergency for years. Guess where they were this week? On the front step. Guess what they are? Unusable in the frozen state they're in. I'd also spent a lot of time the past week putting my address book and recipes on the computer. The same computer that's home, where there's no power to run it.  Lately I adopted the theory that it's great to live in the northeast where the worst of our weather is a winter storm where we hunker down and enjoy a day or two at home until the roads are cleared. No hurricanes, tornadoes, or tsunamis to worry about. Very true, but as the temperature dropped (and the hours without coffee wore on), it was hard to feel cozy at home.

Which isn't to say it was horrible there this morning. Shay and I shared his earbuds and listened to a podcast of "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" and laughed our heads off. Then Harry, Shay and I played Monopoly, where Harry set the course of the game by giving Shay and me so many discounts and tips and generally throwing his money around in gleeful philanthropy, that even Shay didn't have the heart to go for the jugular, and we decided the game was a three-way win. Kit "undecorated" her room by deciding to get rid of what she no longer needs or wants. Hank did...hmm, remarkably well without coffee.

And, who cares about any of this? We're safe and warm. We made it here through a landscape as stunning as I'd ever driven through. Our town and the towns west of us as we drove to Albany looked so beautiful with all the trees encased in glittery, crystalline ice. Until we'd get to a place where one had come down, blocking and scarring the road. This happened numerous times and we had to change course more than once. 

The power will come back to my house at some point.  Until then - dispatches from Albany.

NoThing is Sacred

It's that time again: we're clearing out the house. So far, six carloads of stuff have left, the volunteers at our local thrift shop are starting to wonder where I'm getting all this stuff, and frankly, so am I.  After all, we went through this routine just six months ago when we redid the den.

We're now putting in a basement system so that Hank and I can stop being human sump pumps (using a wet-vac to suck up the water as the basement floods) every time we get a big rain.  "Short-term pain, long-term gain," as Hank says, but this work means that everything possible in the basement has to come out. Of course, this is the perfect opportunity to get rid of stuff, because, if nothing else, where will it all fit during the next four weeks while the work is under way? 

So, my family is going into the protective mode that they go into when I'm in a mood to move stuff out. Nothing is sacred. Nothing. However, there are personality issues to consider when embarking on such a job. Harry's like me when it comes to stuff, but unfortunately due to that fact, if he stripped down his stuff any more, he'd really be stripped down, with nothing left to even wear. What a shame - he's my biggest ally on the War on Clutter and he has nothing to give.I think Kit would be with the program if she had the time and interest to go through her stuff, but she doesn't. Shay and Hank (no surrprise here) are very much alike in this respect as in most others: they love their stuff.

A couple observations about stuff and the stuff that accumulates:

1. Dreidls are the rabbits of all Jewish paraphernalia, right after the Festival of Lights ends, they get busy making baby dreidls: I know this because they're all over my house.

2. If you've ever had a child who likes Legos, like dog hair these will be in and under everything in your house no matter how much work you've done to clean them out.

3. If you need a hair band, look where the Legos are, or the dreidls if you're Jewish. Ditto rubber bands.

4. If you have something that's been kept together with a rubber band that crumbles when you pick it up, you've had the item for too long. Trash it - no one else will be able to use it.

5. Even never used rubber bands will crumble if you have too many (I hope that when I die I get buried with our rubber bands, obviously at some point I thought I'd run short at some point in eternity - why else would I have so many? If I get to work quickly after death, I'll be able to make one hell of a rubber band ball.)

6. I believe it's possible for electronics to function even if the original packaging is disposed of. This may be a hypothesis in need of verification. Therefore, I'm chucking the boxes and will report back when the data is all in.

7. Headless Barbies and legless Kens should be trashed. This needs no explanation.

8. An efficient way of disposing of glass items is to drop them on a concrete floor. This is efficient for a few reasons: you do not need to go through the decision-making process of whether to keep or not, you do not need to wrap item in paper and take to thrift shop if deciding to dispose of item, and due to the scatter factor of glass hitting concrete, the floor will end up well-vacuumed. One word of caution: should item be dropped the day before your daughter's sleep-over, vacuum very, very carefully as a friend rolling over in her sleep onto a shard of glass could necessitate a mid-night trip to the emergency room, which would negate any efficiency gained in the first place.

Okay, enough fun for now. It's time for me to go back to the dungeon, um, I mean the basement.