1/1/10 Throwing things out and feeling guilty

This is going through old boxes, shelves, and drawers.
I have thrown out: a squeaky Christmas tape, an old pillow, Grandma Lil’s magnifying glass on a snakey metal pedestal, a box of old Toastmasters award plaques, spicy buttery popcorn salt, paper bags, etc. (I added the etc. to give myself permission to stop trying to remember everything I’ve thrown out.)

I’ve also got a bag going for stuff to the Goodwill, including the fake knife in a wooden display box that Kevin gave me years ago for the wall. I say fake because it looks metal but is actually plastic. The point of it is that it looks medieval and he knew that I was playing with the SCA.

There's also a bag for the Shire of Windy Meads. I forget which current shire resident volunteered to take the old banners off of my hands, but I know I didn’t erase the email, so I can find him. I’m pretty sure it was a him. Maybe I can find the sheep banners and pass them on, too.

I’m ditching an old prescription for painkillers and one for antibiotics (I took as many as the
doctor told me to) in an old peanut butter jar. When I asked the hospice how to dispose of Aunt D’s leftover pharmaceuticals after she died, they said to put them into a Ziploc bag with kitty litter and dish soap and throw them into the trash. It was freaky, but I did it. I know they’re not supposed to go down the toilet any more, what with not breaking down at sewage treatment plants and entering waterways.

Unpacking Grandma

If the pile of Christmas stuff didn't look like enough to make a full van load, this is the reason why. Along with bins and boxes of Christmas stuff, Aunt D was storing Grandma L's "paperwork".

While Aunt D had saved, among other things, the bible that her ex-husband had given to his Grandmother in 1965 and every bill she had ever paid, still in the envelope with all inserts; Grandma L had saved every piece of paper that anyone had ever sent her and then some.

The years of Aunt D's back bills and banks statements I dealt with before she was released from the hospital to hospice care. They had been neatly arranged in rows in her dresser drawers. A few things were in boxes in closets. I didn't throw away anything that was needed. Once a utility has acknowledged your payment on the next bill, I don't see any point in keeping back copies.

The bundles on the top are letters, cards, and postcards.  Underneath are diaries.  Some of the entries were in handwriting that was perhaps 3 points tall.  (Check that out with your computer font.) 

The diaries scare me a little.

I'll share an email that I sent to my sister while my desk was looking like the top picture. Can't see my keyboard? Well, I did have to move that maroon box to reach it. Or the burgundy box if it's necessary to be picky. (Skin Horse is a cool webcomic, but it's best to start at the beginning. Immerse yourself in the archives.)

So many ways to start this email . . .

1 - I have strange relatives all over my desk . . . and under it.

2 - The urge to light a match has been mollified by finding a clipping of The Mob. (No, there will be no explanation.)

3 - OMG she never threw any piece of paper out.

Aunt D was a pale echo of the original. Although I didn't find any bills beside the 1939 water bills and doctor bills. Either she didn't keep those or she only kept things that were evidence (they were from when she was married to Woody, if that's pertinent) or Aunt D tossed the rest of the bills. My recycling bin is grateful, whatever spared it.

As it is, every diary and photo album is filled with random clippings and bits and pieces. I can't just toss them because maybe one in six is related to a relative. The rest are poems, advice columns, editorial essays, etc. (Etc. includes a clipping of the birth of a 16lb 4oz girl at General Hospital by caesarian section, with speculation that it may be a record.) ((It also includes a little notebook with hand-written risqué jokes from someone named Ted Storm.))

I am evil because I threw out all of the negatives. I blame new technology. I collected the pictures and threw out a couple of those sticky page albums - minus the sticky. I am evil because I'm going to throw out the disintegrating "family" bible after I'm sure I got the information out of it. It was started by Grandma L some time after she married Woody, so it probably doesn't have anything I haven't already logged.

I am evil because I keep saying "Who are these people?" instead of thinking of it as a treasure hunt. She did label some of the older pictures and the newer ones that came pre-inserted into album pages. But some of the old ones were kicked around a bit, then glued into one of those old black paper albums, then ripped off and put into a sticky page album. So the writing is often half covered with adhered black paper splotches.

I'm evil because I keep thinking "Why did you people write to each other in pencil so often?" Smudgy handwriting on darkened paper is not fun to read. Saving letters may have been a generational thing. She not only has the letters her kids sent her when they were away, she has her letters to them. That means they brought them back to her. Or maybe they were just trained.

I’m also evil because I’m only going to keep so many pictures of Cousin R. For some of them I had a set and then I inherited Aunt Linda’s and now I have Grandma’s too. I like R and all, but I have to assume that he and Uncle L have copies of these, too.

Found another copy of the RCH will, with his step sister listed has having tenancy of the Sunland house for her lifetime and then it going back to JH (Grandma's first husband and RCH's son). Also some correspondence, which petered out about the time that a lawyer said that they'd need to have the wife that was married to JH when he died petition for it. And that it had to be done before someone legally bought it. (Which may or may not have been true. The lawyers weren't estate lawyers, they were helping Grandma out for free because they knew her.)

I think that's were the adventure of The House That Was Meant To Be Ours ended. Aunt Linda never mentioned the surviving wife bit (it would have been his third one), and may not have known. She certainly latched onto the story. It was one of the big tragedies of her life and proof that she could never catch a break. She was determined that it would never happen again. Not determined enough to, you know, make a will, but determined enough to give me marching orders. See previous post.

Well, I'm going to be more evil and try to identify enough letters as tossable to make the rest fit into one bin and one box for stuff to keep. Did S take up the harmonica? Because it looks like I have Grandma's now. Also an embossing stamp with her name and address. And diaries. I mentioned that the diaries scare me, and not just because I found another set of cheesecake photos . . . taken outside.

I'd better get back to it. May your desk be emptier than mine.

Christmas Has Left the Building

10/29/11

On the date above, the last of Aunt D's Christmas stuff was hauled from her nearly empty house. Well, the last of it that I was willing to haul. The van was full, the drive was five hours, and I wasn't going to come back for a collection of pine cones, a few 3' artificial trees, and things that had faded or gotten bent, but that she couldn't bring herself to throw out.

Aunt D, everyone will think of you every Christmas because you were the one who really did Christmas. Those of us who grew up knowing that the prettiest box would be the one from Aunt D can't think of Christmas without thinking of you. . . even if I take five bins of stuff to Goodwill.

That big red bin with the green lid in front is full of wrapping paper. And it's the good stuff. The bin on top of it is fancy ribbons and the one on top of that is foldable boxes. There's also another bin of ribbon in there somewhere and a big cardboard box in the house that's full of fancy Christmas boxes and tins. It will take years to use it all.

There are also a few other cardboard boxes in the house that didn't make it into the picture. Christmas may have left the building, but it's finding homes in many places.

Guilt to Goodwill 2011

11/11/11

This will start with a list of things going to Goodwill today. Some of them will have had pictures taken of them first, but the first things on the list definitely haven’t.

Also, I took an orange Rubbermaid bin and a smattering of Fall Decorations in to work. The bin will be used for the food drive collection for Thanksgiving. The decorations will be used around the office. Cheryl too custody of most of them.


For Goodwill:
1 big foldable box for Christmas Ornaments
a bag with 3 to 5 tinsel garlands
a decorative pack of holiday notepads with a wall hanger
a red and green Rubbermaid bin
a small new testament
a pack of 3 colored men’s handkerchiefs
a bible promises book
a 5x7 frame (with a picture of Aunt D that’s almost too faded to see – and besides that’s a pose that I have multiple copies of. She and Grandma both took a liking to a few pictures of themselves, and of my Dad in Grandma’s case, and got many, many copies made.)
a 9x10 frame – empty
2 store bought knitted Christmas stockings
2 3-packs of flat silver plated Christmas ornaments
1 green painted pine cone with glitter
2 unbreakable Christmas ornaments
8 small decorative packages
2 stocking hangers, light
2 hair clips – fake silver and turquoise
3 foam garlands
1 Christmas watch
1 clock radio
1 French phrase book
1 French-English dictionary
1 NA bird guide
1 book Collected Verse of Edgar A. Guest

OK – It looks like I have to keep that one. Maybe. There’s an inscription in it. (Punctuation as written.) To Our: Sister and Aunt With Love L – D 2-8-’63. There are three pictures tucked in the front and several things tucked throughout. One picture is a late style polaroid of Grandma L and her sister M. L’s Birthday 1979 is writing on it. So this probably was given back to Aunt Dolores when Great Aunt M died.

A newspaper clipping of one of Guest’s poems was tucked in about halfway through the book, together with his obituary as the Plain People’s Poet. Apparently he wrote a daily poem for the Detroit Free Press and was syndicated.

Other tuck-ins are two pictures from July 1942 of Grandma and her 3 children and Grandma and Neal Ledford, about whom I know nothing; a tag from Montgomery Ward, an order form for Christmas cards with photos in them from Pacific Photo 1945 Lomita Blvd, Lomita Calif (before zip codes); and a plastic book mark.

The book mark is odd. It’s a bit too thick for a bookmark. It looks like a flat red arrow. Down the shaft is printed: This is where I fell asleep. On the arrowhead is written: The Hart Marker Patent Pending. And on the fletching is: Place Flap Over Page. Oh, the fletching has a folded flap on the back of it. Just below the fletching is: Slide Down to Line. Then there’s a movable clear plastic circle with two blue arrows on each side that can slide up and down the arrow shaft. I guess it’s meant to mark the exact line that you finished reading. I’ve never seen one, so I’m guessing the pending patent wasn’t a big money maker.

I think everything is going to be tossed except the pictures. I’m not thrilled with the poetry, either, so the book will got to Goodwill. These comments will be its only lasting trace. And they will last only as long as anyone is interested in reading them. But that counts to assauge my guilt. Well done, guilt list.

2 plastic and wooden bird decorations (not holiday)
1 wooden memo pad holder, with a wooden goose shape
1 glass and mirror carousel horse music box
3 red tartan napkins
1 matching red tartan table runner
1 red tartan tree skirt with applique teddy bears
1 book Shakespeare major plays
1 book He Leadeth Me
1 book of Dolls
1 book Nevada Ghost Towns
1 book Norman Rockwell: A Sixty Year Retrospective
1 paper World Atlas for Students MCMLXII – 1962, I think. The map showing religions of the world includes Mohammedans. I think that one will be recycled
1 National Geographic book: Discovering Britain & Ireland (comment later)
1 book – used copy of Frank McCourt’s ‘Tis: A Memoir

There have been business cards from the Redding utility company all through the books and papers. Odd that they had so many of them and were still not signed up for elderly rates. Either they didn’t know about it or Aunt D decided not to touch the word senior citizen with a ten foot discount.

2 heavier stocking holders
a deck of cards – used from Sahara Hotel Las Vegas
a Christmas hurricane lantern for candles
4 large decorative velveteen Christmas stockinge
1 paper Halloween tablecloth 54x102
pack of 6 Halloween paper bags for luminaires
1 Christmas pin
1 pack New Year’s Eve horns
1 pack New Year’s Eve hats
4 Christmas light nets for bushes
bag of about 30 Christmas light clips for rain gutters
4 plastic poinsettia glasses
sleigh basket for flowers
3 poinsettia candle wreaths
3 holly candle wreaths
2 penguin place mats
small ceramic message board
6 red cloth place mats
misc paper doilies
Christmas cat wooden napkin ring
Santa couch pillow
Christmas table runner
Santa neck pillow
2 holiday trivets
5 plasticized holiday table cloths
4 bead wreath napkin rings
4x6 bound lined notebook
unopened pack 4 white luxury cotton napkins
3 lg centerpieces
4 small centerpieces
2 baskets for centerpieces
misc pinecones and plastic or cloth vegetation for centerpieces
50x60 throw
1 green steerite bin
white reindeer centerpiece
3’ Santa floor decoration
snowman family mantle decoration

Hawaii hula Santa 6” (I took a shine to this and have kept it so far. It made me think of my middle son and the fact that he and the dear daughter in law honeymooned in Hawaii. When I mentioned it to him, he was pretty sure that they had given it to Aunt D. With the extra family connection, I'm probably going to keep it. It's cute.)

wire reindeer decoration
(tossed a couple of old FTD arrangements – they looked sad without the flowers and had faded and gotten bent)
gold Christmas tree candle 8”
ceramic single-piece nativity – 12” tall x 6” wide x 5” deep
stuffed Santa floor decoration - 1 ft
18” plastic wreath/plate candle holder for table
12” plastic wreath/plate candle holder for table
2 x 6” plates for candles, one with a wreath
1 decorative hurricane for candle 8”
2 X 4” decorative snowpeople
decorated bundle of long cinnamon sticks
set of 3 embroidered silk doilies
18” stuffed Santa
18” silver standing Santa for floor
16” maroon velvet Santa for floor
8” dark red Santa freestanding
6” white and gold Santa freestanding
6” green brocade Santa freestanding
driftwood hanging Santa head
10” old plastic & flocked Hong Kong made Santa – standing, with base
54 x 102 silver & white table cover
6 packs decorative napkins
silver-plated pie server
28 non-glass Christmas ornaments
6 Christmas refrigerator magnets
4” standing decoration Santa on Soccer ball, ceramic
2” tall 4 hinged wooden pieces, santas and reindeer
6 tiny bell & ornament charms for bracelet, colored
holiday night light
3” long plastic toy car
hunting horn & bells for hanging on doorknob
plastic mistletoe ball w elf – 4” dia
12” tall ceramic & cloth gnome Santa, blue

More Old (2009) Guilt

12/31/09

I’m going to watch balancing point next. It’s a series of artistic rock-stacking vignettes in scenic mountain areas . . . played in reverse. Aw. The audio has been disabled because the video producer didn’t get authorization from WMG. Whoever that is. That's a pity because the effect was greatly enhanced by the music.

So I’ll turn on some Manheim Steamroller on iTunes. It’s nicely seasonal. I’m starting with Catching Snowflakes On Your Tongue. Segue into Masters In This Hall. There’s no authorization from the Steamroller listed in the YouTube part of that link, so I don't know how long it will stay up. The Amazon link might make up for it. Go Steamroller.

Aunt Dolores used to have flowers sent to Grandma L’s grave for her birthday and Mother’s Day. Possibly other days as well. I haven’t even sent flowers to Aunt D’s grave. She did some work setting me up to be her heir and caretaker. Not to the point of writing a will or visiting or anything. But when I visited at Christmas, she’d talk about me having her house because I was the one that needed it and the one that she depended on.

I wasn’t staying in touch because I thought there’d be a payoff. She had married for one thing. He was six years older than her and disabled. I'm sure she had assumed that he'd predecease her, but by August it was becoming obvious that he would probably wouldn't. So even if she'd written a will, there was no way I’d get the house, or want to. Not with a surviving spouse.

From September to December, I drove or bussed up to Redding to look after her and make arrangements. No one else from the family could make it up there, for various reasons. Uncle L, her brother, for instance, was in LA having a serious hernia operation, complicated by some possible heart trouble.

He came by when he could, and he gave me travel money, which made things easier. Nearly everyone else was out of state, with families and jobs and illnesses of their own.
Aunt D’s husband couldn’t make decisions about her illness and treatment. He was very hard of hearing and had been used to Aunt D taking care of him.

Neighbors tended to him while I did phoning and paperwork. Spouse was a veteran, so Aunt D qualified for burial in a veteran’s plot. So Grandma L is buried in Palos Verdes and Aunt D was cremated and buried in Redding. She had been hoping to be buried in the cemetery by the river, but Spouse didn’t really want to spend the money, and I don’t blame him, all things considered. He's going to need every bit of it for the next few years. The veteran’s plot is where he will go, too, unless his son has other ideas, later.

Aunt D really hated the idea of Spouse’s son getting the house. She instructed me to tell him that I was supposed to get it. But I’m not touching that with a ten foot pole. Not with anyone, and definitely not with a half-deaf man in a wheelchair. One who will need all the money in the house equity to get through the rest of his own life.

I’ll tell you sometime about her reasons for fixating on bequeathing the house. It will include old family stories about the wrong person getting the house, the property, the estate. Right now it’s New Year’s Eve. I’m going to watch balancing point again. It’s soothing. And I’m going to throw away a few more things on my desk.

[I've found out since then that there was probably some guilt to her urge to keep the house in the family. The down payment for the house had come from a house she sold that her mother had given to her. And her brother had been semi-supporting them, kicking in a few thousand here and there for taxes, for furniture, for the down payment on a car. So it had to feel like she had siphoned her family resources into Spouses family.

Still. Wills, people. If you want to leave someone something, write a bloody will. Don't imply that it's someone's family duty to fight for something that they're not legally entitled to, especially when you've set them up to be out of the legal loop.]

Let's Update the List

When I started this blog, I was feeling very down (there will be an entry about feeling better later) and I think I kind of got a kick from starting a blog about feeling guilty and then not writing a second post for more than a year. Especially since one of the things I feel guilty about is not getting things done. And disappointing people. That's two things. No, I'm not going to go into a parody of the Spanish Inquisition Sketch.

For awhile, not updating the blog was actually comforting and self-confirming. I gave myself permission to fail in this one thing. It's easy to try to do too much, and to feel guilty not because you're not doing well or not doing enough, but because you can think of many more things to do than anyone could make time for. Not that I was necessarily doing enough, I'll leave that as a separate question and one that won't be addressed here. Here I will just say that for awhile this blog was my symbolic lowest priority. It let me prioritize other things to the low side of the to do list and to not worry that the bottom of the list wasn't getting done.

Right now, I feel like updating lists, and that includes this list. Adding things I feel guilty about currently. I'm giving myself permission to do badly at it. This will be a first draft. And I may not fix it later. It's going to rain this afternoon, and there are things I have to get put away in the garage before that happens. So if this takes too long, I'll cut it off suddenly. Sorry about that.

Let's try guilt categories. There's Family. There's the House (for some people, that's intrinsically tied to family, but not for me). There's Writing. There's Work. There's Pets. There's Exercise, which may be a subcategory of Health, which may be a subcategory of Me. There's Organizing, which feels like a category, but which may be a metacategory - something that I feel that I need to do to take care of all of the other categories.

Also under Me is Learning. I feel like I'm stagnating if I'm not learning things. And there are a couple of subjects that I have an interest in and that I've spent a chunk of time reading up on. Let's call these subjects Nodes. I'll get back to them. In fact, I think that all of the categories deserve their own posts.

So - Family - House - Writing - Work - Pets - Exercise - Health - Me - Learning- Nodes - Organization. Looking at the list, I have an urge to take Me out. Underneath it all, it's all about Me. It's My family and My house and My urge to write. I think I'm going to let Me and Organization be overcategories. Or maybe criteria for prioritizing. And Excercise is obviously a subcategory of Health.

Learning, Nodes, and Writing go together. Let's hit the thesaurus to see how they connect. That was interesting. Learning is linked to acquiring or collecting. Writing is, for me, a kind of sharing. The Nodes are subordinate to both - or a means to do both. Let's call that category Collect & Share.

That gives me: Family - House - Collect & Share - Work - Health. Five categories. One for each finger on one hand. (I decided to lump pets into family.) Now the question is, what category is my desk in, because it could sure use some organizing. Starting with a machete.

The Guilt Continued

Still posting from the cusp of 2010.

That clears a bit of the flotsam on my desk. It’s December 31, 2009 and now is a good time for clearing, even incomplete clearing. I’ve ended up with a fair bit of Grandma L’s stuff, as I mentioned last post. I inherited it from Aunt D when she died last December 18 (2008). I don’t think I’ll ever think of Christmas without thinking of Aunt D.

Aunt D had no children of her own and was always involved with her nieces and nephews. She always gave really good presents. Not only were the presents good, they were wrapped with fancy wrapping. No one else in the family used such fancy wrappings. We suspected that she paid to have them wrapped at Sears or maybe even a fancier store. There were metallic papers and intricate bows. There were plastic poinsettias and fat ribbons.

No two boxes were alike, unless it was done deliberately. Sometimes if she got, say, me and my two sisters a similar gift, the boxes might be wrapped identically. This was different from everyone else’s presents. Everyone else had a few rolls of flat paper wrapping and curling ribbon. So there was little variety in the wrapping, mostly.

There was one mitigating factor to that, though, and that was Aunt D. We always saved the paper, ribbons, and decorations from her boxes. They could be cut down to wrap smaller boxes in other years. So our plain wrappings were boosted by her hand-me-downs. Oh, and we saved the boxes, too.

Later, much, much later, I learned that she was a shopaholic and that her spending had been a burden on my Uncle L, her brother, and my Grandma L nearly all her adult life. My Dad, her other brother, had pulled away, giving her nothing but advice and criticism when she overspent.

Oh, look. Grandma L had for some reason tucked a newspaper clipping of the death of Phillipe Cousteau, Jacque Cousteau’s son, into the Christmas Story book. She’s hand dated it Fri. June 29-’79. My youngest son, Eric, would be born November of ’79. I have no idea why she thought I, or my sons, would need the clipping. It’s going into the recycling.

Grandma L used to send me and the boys CARE packages – boxes with ‘useful’ things in them. There were find-a-word books, which the boys enjoyed, and which could be bought for a quarter at the drug store. There were packets from Kentucky Fried Chicken, with a knife, spork, napkin, and wet-wipe in each one. I forget what else the boxes were stuffed with. Usually nothing to terribly useful. But she would collect the items and mail them and the kids did enjoy getting them.

I’m listening to Principles of economics, translated, by the Standup Economist on YouTube, to cheer myself up. My YouTube favorites are sort of like getting a box from Grandma L. Not too terribly useful, but very cheering.