Juggling Joy: Throw out the junk!

This weekend, I had made myself this huge, detailed list, and also a shorter post-it list for Friday.

See! There was no way I was going to type all that into a blog. And I got 23 out of 31 of those done! And some other things got attempted. Hubby vacuumed the snot out of the gap behind the sliding glass door, but I never got around to hitting it with soap and water.

I cleaned out the attic!!!! I woke up at like 6am on Sunday and decided to risk waking everybody up and go ahead and start working on it. It was only 73 degrees outside at the moment, and therefore not 120 in the attic. The snag was that throwing things down the stairs of the attic would wake everyone up for sure, and I really didn't want to make 45 trips up and down the (loud seeming) attic stairs. So I stacked and labeled and bidded (bode?) my time. I looked through and sorted all the boxes of my stuff in the attic. I said all! There were like 4 boxes that I wanted to save 2 items out of the box and could pitch the rest. There were at least 2 boxes that I had decided before looking that I could pitch the whole thing. If a box full of BA books have been in the attic for at least 2 years and you haven't thought about anything in the box - pitch it! I will never wear my wedding dress petticoat again. We don't even own the things that used to live on this stand. Those space heaters are 5 years old and we do NOT need their original boxes anymore. It was soooo fun! Because of the temperature and the baby sleeping, I could take my time.

Later, much after the baby woke up, Papa was awake and could watch smallfry while I actually tossed things down from the attic. Very little was heavy enough to need to be walked down the attic steps. It filled up the whole "landing area" below the steps. For those of you who know the house, that's from the dryer to the door to the loft, at least 2 feet deep! Then I sorted it out between stuff to donate and trash.

Here's the donate stack at the bottom of our stairs.

And here's the trash pile. That vacuum box is stuffed with stuff. That cardboard box is 2ft x 2 ft by 10 inches. Half of the green bin is from the attic or loft. HALF!!!

There was a hideous curtain stapled to a 2x4 that I decided to pitch. It was still in good shape and someone might think the colors were nice. Lots of huge paisley in nearly jewel tones. I purposefully set it up against the vacuum box and trash can and spread out the "pretty" parts for display. It had vanished before the hour was out and I took this photo. I hope they enjoy it!

I have to tell this story on my husband even though it is not flattering. He knew he was being a slug and grinned when I accused him. I was moving the stuff from upstairs to down and the putting the trash out. It was probably 85 degrees out by then. He was sitting on the couch in his undies, watching the baby. On my zillionth trip up the stairs or out to the trash, I said, "If you had pants on, I'd be putting you to work here." Huge grin, "Yep!" and proceeded to slid down to a laying position on the couch. "You slug!" "Yep!"

On Friday, I managed to vote, turn in some boots for sole repair ($76 IS cheaper than size 14D boots), and find out at the camera repair store that I wanted to buy a new camera. Oddly enough, in one of those quirks of fate, once the repair lady held my camera for 10 minutes, it worked perfectly for 3 days.

Saturday, while Quint was napping, I went through a whole bunch of boxes in the loft and threw a bunch of things away. I combined some boxes, labeled the empty ones there, and gathered things from around the house to fill another box.

In the garage, loft, and attic, I stuck a unique, orange stickie on each box which was either empty or half empty. I knew that a bunch of these were empty, but the garage shelves seem lighter when I see all those post-its.

I found a bunch of old pictures in some of those boxes.
I had my birthday party at the skating rink every year. I'm the one on the right.

These are before and after pictures of my first perm. It was Texas in the big hair of the 80s. WHAT WAS I THINKING!!!

And here's that perm on a regular day. In my memory of my tiny Texas town, I only remembered there being like 3 black folks in the whole town. Perhaps my whole world was just my own class. I'm on the back row with a blue headband.