We visited this Route 66 attraction this summer.
Here’s a video of some British guys who decided to dive into the murky water of the old swimming hole. It’s not usually open for swimming anymore; the water isn’t maintained and is rather gross.
Here’s what they were diving into:
Looks yummy.
The signs are all strategically placed around the neighborhood. We’ve got the tables set up, and the items out and priced. We’re not too worried about people stealing stuff in the middle of the night; the porch is pretty enclosed and dark so I doubt people will wander up and take stuff. We have 15 lamps for sale. (I’m including some small lights and a light-up sign in the total.) Yep, we like the lighting. I made one last pass through my books and added some more, so there’s lots of fun stuff in there. There are a couple of last minute boxes I want to go through, but it’s not really necessary, since we have a full porch worth of stuff.
But we’re ready for any early birds.
Remaining to-dos:
Books, lamps, board games, fun home decor, lamps, toys, Avon collectibles, lamps, clothes.
Saturday only, September 22nd – 8 am to ?
Did I mention we have lamps for sale? We seem to have a lot of them. As you already know, we’re de-cluttering the house, so lots of fun entertaining stuff has to go. If there’s something from our house that you’ve always wanted, I might just sell it to you! (Dog and iPhone not included.)
Think about it! When I become infamous, you’ll be able to proudly say, “This lava lamp once belonged to Steph Mineart before she went on that massive shooting spree was eaten by cannibals in the Amazon jungle wrote that world famous classic novel!”
Own a piece of history, really cheap!
(Also – FREE CUCUMBERS!)
Standard disclaimer: If you’re worried this post is about you, then it’s not about you at all. The people it’s about will never believe it’s about them.
One of the things I can’t stand (yes again with those) is people who don’t listen to you until you’re rude to them. You can say the same thing to the person 10 times without them hearing you at all, and when you finally get irritated and say something like “Dude, fuck the fuck off already!” they hear you, but they get huffy about it, and say things like “well, you don’t have to be rude!” Clearly, I do have to be rude, because you ignored me when I wasn’t.
So I find myself, whenever I run across someone who I suspect isn’t going to listen to me, jumping into rude mode right away, just to cut down on the time I have to spend conversing. Sometimes that may be justified, but not always, so it’s a habit I need to unlearn. Finding the appropriate level of rudeness and appropriate point of application is tricky.
We managed to get a lot done on Sunday to the house. We spent the morning sorting through some of the garage sale pile. Our friend Jen came by with baby Sam to help us sort some clothes in the early afternoon. Later we hung a bunch of pictures that we just haven’t gotten to yet, and in the evening I sorted lots of our tools in the basement. We don’t really need to get rid of any of those; they’re all useful items that I bought for my old house or that Stephanie’s dad has given her, and we have plenty of storage for them. We just need them to not all be in a jumbled pile when we need to find them for use.
I think we have plenty of stuff together for the yard sale. That’s not to say we have the house organized; there’s still tons to do. We’re maybe 25% done. But I’m excited by how much stuff we’ve pulled together.
We accomplished a lot of sorting and organizing yesterday. In the morning, we cleaned out and reorganized the coat closet in the dining room and identified stuff that either needed to go in the garage sale or needs to be relocated downstairs in the space we liberated last weekend in the basement. At the end it felt like we did Pressure Washing in Roseville CA ! However, the result was satisfying.
Stephanie’s dad came down and helped us get a chunk of the garage cleaned out yesterday, too. There’s lots more to do; we only got about a fourth of it done. But it’s a start. We inherited a lot of “it came with the house” stuff in the garage that we need to discard, but some of it needs to be sold. That will have to happen after the garage sale. We hired #1 Junk Removal in Staten Island NY | Demolitions Rubbish Cleanouts to help us with the junk removal. Some of it will be freecycle, and some will be craigslist. At the same time, he helped us with another garage problem we had; part of the soffit on the south side of the garage was rotting and falling down. I hadn’t noticed it at all. So we need to hire someone to rebuild some of the trim on the garage. For cleaning services in the garage, Top Stockton, California Junk Removal Service | Debris & Rubbish Removal can be checked out! Visit sites like https://www.ozoneskips.com.au/skip-bins-morphett-vale/ if you are planning a major cleaning or decluttering project to help with the collection of trash.
In the evening, we ordered Chinese food, opened a bottle of Shiraz, watched part of the first season of Maude from Netflix, and sorted out and organized Stephanie’s cassette tapes. (She still has tape players in both cars.)
We have lots to do today, too. Our friend Jen is coming over to help do some more sorting.
“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” -William Morrisqu
Yesterday we settled on a date for a yard sale at our house. 2 weeks from now on Saturday, September 22nd. We sorted out lots of stuff to put into the sale this weekend. It’s a very small dent in the scheme of things, but it’s a dent, and I certainly feel better.
I’m not sure I’ve entirely cured the problem of “maybe there’s something I can do with this…” I sorted through lots of small throw rugs, but kept a couple that I love but just don’t have a good place for. Yet. Yeah. I probably need to go through that sorting again.
We had pulled quite a few things out to sell last week, with the intention of joining a friend’s garage sale, but we got scared off by the threat of rain on Saturday morning. That worked out okay, because we had a lot going on this weekend anyway, and loading up and taking stuff to a sale was cutting things pretty tight.
One of the difficulties in our getting organized process is our time management. We both have a tendency to think “we’ll get to this” and we never do. We’re always purchasing space for the objects in our lives with time we don’t actually own. I find myself saying – “I’ll hold on to this because I’m going to do X, Y, or Z someday soon” and that justifies keeping it, because time is ethereal, and we can just lazily spend it because there are unlimited amounts.
And I have to confess, I thought I was way better at time management than Stephanie is, and she has more of a problem with purchasing with borrowed time than I do. That is, of course, not the case at all. Or at least, I may be slightly better about it, but not significantly enough to really make our lives function well. Here’s a graphic example of the problem:
I made this in Google docs this morning and shared it with Stephanie, and we were both freaked out by it when we saw it. Of course this is padded all over, but you get the general idea; there are a finite amount of spaces to be filled in with activities, and we have way more things to do than actually fit. So we do things like cut corners on sleep and skip meals and the gym and skating, or have to skip seeing friends. That’s not good at all. Plus I’m looking at this and realizing I spent last year watching something like 10 hours a week watching TV, that all came out of my sleep schedule. No wonder I feel like crap.
Clearly, organizing our things goes hand in hand with budgeting our time better so we spend much less time cleaning and more time eating and drinking wine with our friends and reading good books and making pretty internets.
My friend Cate is running a marathon tomorrow in honor of her mom, who died a few years ago of melanoma. Cate is raising funds for the Melanoma Research Foundation, and she’s really close to her goal. If you had a few dollars to add, I’m sure Cate would be really thrilled.