Spring Cleaning

(Also known as, “Sh*t happens.”)

This weekend our local public golf course is closed. That’s where we almost always play golf on weekends here.

Why? Well, because even though it’s a public course, they let folks “join” for $420 per year. In return you can play golf all year long for free. Oh, if you want to ride in a cart you have to pay more, but we always walk, so that’s all we pay.

And we’re too cheap to pay to go play someplace else unless we go out of town for a weekend or other trip.

Big deal, you say? So what, you demand?

Well, if we can’t play golf, all the chores that we routinely put off when the golf course beckons begin to shout at us, “ME FIRST, ME FIRST!!” This weekend the one that shouted the loudest was “Clean out the attic.”

We moved in to this house almost exactly 20 years ago. The boxes from that move all went into the attic. So did all of our kids’ home-school books and records and tests and “homework.” (I should say “assignments,” because they went to SCHOOL at home, so how could they have “homework?”)

Also into the attic went the boxes from computer and printer and monitor, because you never know when you might have to send something back for service or warranty replacement, and you might need that original box and packing!

Tax records and receipts, outgrown toys, and lots of “stuff” we didn’t use much any more but might want to use again. An artificial Christmas tree (no, NOT a “holiday tree!”), Christmas decorations, and boxes. And MORE boxes. We had boxes that were full and boxes that were empty. We had boxes that were stacked, boxes that were just tossed in a pile, and boxes that had been flattened out.

It took HOURS!

Once we had tossed or carried all the STUFF down out of the attic, we began to sort through it and consolidate all the trash (mostly, guess what... BOXES!!) We had to stop emptying the attic twice just to make more room in our two-car garage to hold all the STUFF.

Then, once it was all down in the garage, I spent three more hours just flattening boxes and putting little ones into bigger ones until only HALF of the two-car garage was full.

We now have one vehicle in the garage. The other one has been banished to the driveway until we can get all the piled up trash hauled away. The trash pile is HUGE, over 6 feet high, taking up most of one “bay” in the garage. There’s WAY too much to just drag out to the street on garbage pick-up day and expect the trash men to haul off for us. It’ll likely take WEEKS of dragging out 4-5 big boxes each trash day (Monday and Thursday in our neighborhood).

Then there’s a smaller pile of stuff that’s still good, but we don’t want any more. That we will either give away or donate to a local organization that helps the needy.

I’m tired, and I will probably be sore in the morning. Tomorrow I’ll try to take a picture of the trash pile so you’ll get an idea of what we did. Oh, and I’ll try to get another picture of the yucca. The bottom blooms are all out now and will soon begin declining and dropping off, but the top buds still have several days to go before they’ll open. Tomorrow will probably be the last day before the bottom starts to look scraggly.

So, what did we accomplish today? Well there’s not much left up in the attic, but we seldom go up there anyway so what difference does that make?

Ah! NOW there’s room to start storing NEW stuff up there!