Not Guilty Yet

I'm of two minds about these things.  They are handmade felt toys.  There's a very good chance that my Grandma L made them.  Or at least some of them. 

I can't imaging any child playing with them.  The felt would fall apart.  On the one hand, keeping them as a kind of tribute wouldn't be a bad thing.  On the other, what kind of a tribute is having a bunch of things stuffed in boxes where no one sees them?

They're cute.  But they're not the only handmade things that she left. 

They were in boxes at her house that I had never seen.  Then they were in boxes at my Aunt's.  Now they're in boxes at mine. 

When I was in a quandary about other items for another relative, my sister suggested making a shadow box.  In that case, I think I'll eventually do that.  In this case, I'm not so sure.

I keep starting sentences with, "these are cute, and all . . .", but I'm not really sure that they are.  The idea that they're stuffed animal toys is endearing.  And the idea that they were made by our grandmother is nostalgic.  But they're worn and aged.

 

And with Grandma L, you don't know that the wear came from kids playing with them.  She made crafts to sell at more than one time in her life.  These could have been samples that got worn by knocking around in the box.  I think that if they had belonged to one of her children, they would have had a label.  That was certainly the case with the baby clothes, baby shoes, rattles, and locks of hair. 

 

Well, they've been memorialized here. If I do toss or sell them, I've kept the images. I may send the pictures to cousins and siblings to see if anyone else remembers or wants to keep them.

 

I suppose they don't quite qualify as antiques.  My father was born in 1930, so that puts an upper limit on their age.  I'm fairly sure they were made long after that.  But you never know. 

So here they are.  I haven't found any evidence that she made the patterns.  She both developed her own patterns and used purchased ones, for other craft things she did. 

Most of the patterns she developed were flat, or mostly flat.  She had a knack for drawing.  Oh, the background runners came from the other side of the family.  Those may or may not have been done by a different grandma.  I'm going to have to decide about them, too. 

Guilt and Grins - or - Sometimes Cleaning is Catching

It's cool when cleaning and organizing seems to be communicable.  I deep cleaned an organized a cupboard on Sunday.  Dear Son started in on another cupboard on Monday. 

He apologized for it being in the explosion stage when I came home from work.

Doesn't look so bad?  Wait.  There's more.

In celebration of someone else getting on it, I think I'm going to tell the boy that anything can go except one of the castle shaped baking pans.  Oh, and I'll want a picture of the brown casserole on the stool.

Yeah, there's a story about that.  If you don't hear it, it's still in my kitchen.  It may stay because it's a convenient shape for stacking and handy for taking to pot lucks, because of the heavy lid.  It travels well.  If it's filled with little enough to allow you to invert the lid, you can even stack a pie on top of it and the pie will be relatively safe for a long car trip.

As a non-guilt related aside, do you see the fake brick on the wall?  There is real brick under the stove.  And the area to the side, with the fake brick on it?  I checked it out.  Under the fake brick is dry wall.  Under the dry wall is an actual brick chimney.  That amuses me. 

There's even an opening, hidden by a metal decorative plate, for a stovepipe.  I could install a wood burning stove there.  Assuming the chimney's still usable.  I've been told that I might want to put a liner in it first, just to be sure. 

Not that I'm planning to install a wood burning stove any time soon.  But in case of a zombie invasion, I know where I could get ahold of one.  Not that I'm in any shape to outrun zombie hoards, even if I wasn't trying to tote a stove. 

There is an antique store in town that specializes in stoves and other kitchen equipment and wares, though.  I've toured through a few times.  They do have one or two stoves that are only half wood burning.  If I won the lottery, I'd consider it.  Of course, for that I'd have to buy tickets. 

OK. I will probably feel guilty about this for awhile.

There are some things you don't like to see on the floor.

Can you tell what they are?  Or what they were before the rain blew under the garage door and dampened the box that they were still stored in because I hadn't gotten to opening and sorting through that box, yet?

They were mortarboard tassles, graduation tassles.  Let's see if I can provide a picture of them from happier days.

I have moved ten times so far in my life.  Eleven if you count going away to school for a couple of semesters. 

My Grandparents, on the other hand, never moved in my lifetime.  Two of the three* went to nursing homes near the end, but their stuff was never removed from the house they had lived in, while they lived.  They also didn't redecorate much.

Scratch that.  They didn't ever redecorate, but sometimes things around the house would change, on a piece by piece basis.  A newfangled 'portable' TV on top of the wooden cabinetted TV, because the big TV stopped working.  A new painting over the TVs, because they had won it in a raffle at the church. Newer TV trays, because they had more grandkids to accommodate. 

They had arranged things the way they wanted them some time ago.  That included the high school graduation portraits on Grandma and Grandpa's wall.  They were there through my entire childhood, with the tassles hanging from the left corner.

You did that to commemorate that kind of success, that kind of milestone.  Grandchildren would occassionally climb up on the back of an overstuffed chair (in the oldest memories there were doilies on the back and arms) to snake a finger through the silkiness of one of them, or to pet them with two or three fingers. 

They would be careful, though because those were obviously prescious things.  Over the years, those grandchildren gave Grandma and Grandpa their own graduation pictures and tassels.  I was the oldest, so mine went up first. 

In that sodden pile, up above, are the tassels from my uncles, aunt, mother, self (high school and college), and my own kids.  Sigh.  I have no idea what I would have done with them, but I feel guilty that they got damaged rather than decided on properly. 

The only tassel unscathed was my ex-husband's.  I'd forgotten I had that.  It got tossed along with the rest.  Less guilt there.  If he'd been interested in it at all, he'd have asked for it. 

For the rest of them, it's a pity.  But if anyone is interested, we still have pictures.  From before and after the soaking. 


* No incest involved.  One had died before I was born and therefore does not figure in my childhood memories, except in bitter stories that my father would tell. 

TOSSING DAD'S STUFF

What do you see below?

They might not look like much to you.  And the title includes the word "Stuff," which is not a word implying great worth.

It's even hard to read the covers unless you get in close.  But Dad saved and treasured these, and after he was dead, Mom treasured them as well.

You could say that they treasured them the way that dragons are said to treasure gold.  That is, they collected them and piled them with other treasured things (although in boxes in closets, rather than in a heap to lie on). 

I am unsure if dragons are supposed to hoard gold for it's symbolic load, rather than their utility.  Dragons don't exist and therefore writers are free to spin reasons that the gold might be useful. 

In my parent's case, the books definitely represented Knowledge, Skill, and Industry.  I don't think they've ever been read.  They were saved so that they could be useful to the children one day, perhaps.  Or the grandchildren. 

They worried about basic building and making skills being lost.  I can sort of see the point.  They bought an empty lot and built their first house, with the help of relatives.  Sometimes, looking back, it feels a bit borderline Urban Amish.  From the Disney movies that they preferred, I'm sure they saw it as maintaining the American Pioneering Spirit. 

I feel guilty tossing the American Pioneering Spirit in the trash.  Even if the covers are all falling off and even intacts sets are going for about five bucks on ebay.  There was no ebay back when these became treasure.

Back then, books were expensive.  Working people didn't finish high school.  If you inherited books, especially useful ones like these, you kept and treasured them. 

I suspect that these had come from Ralph, which would have given them added symbolic weight.  Dad didn't get along with many of the people he worked with.  (Or his relatives or neighbors, but that's a different story.)  Ralph was an older man when he was a younger one, and he respected him.

Ralph had an electrical workshop at home and tinkered with electrical things.  He didn't just put in his time at work, he read up on things and talked about things and figured things out.  He also gave my Dad rides to work for the year that he couldn't drive, himself, for medical reasons. It seemed that gratitude added to respect yields admiration.  Dad admired Ralph.

When Ralph died, his wife asked Dad to take anything he wanted from Ralph's workshop.  She said Ralph would want it that way.  I'm pretty sure that the set of 1923 Hawkin's Electrical Guides came from Ralph.  So did two oscilloscopes, some meters, and various bits and pieces. 

I'd tell you what the bits and pieces were, but, hey - I was a kid when they were collected and stored out in the shed.  I know about the oscilloscopes because I was able to use them, later, to get some extra credit for a high school physics class.  The rest of the things just stayed in jars and boxes and drawers.  I knew that some of the things out in the shed, in the upper garage, in the room off the garage, in the garage . . . (this represents moving to different houses, with different areas that Dad kept toolish things) . . . were Ralph things.  But Dad had collected and bought other things, so I'd have been guessing if I tried to identify which things had been Ralph's.

Except I'm pretty sure that these were.  And I'm throwing out Dad's gratitude and hopes for the future, America the way America used to be, and Knowledge, Skill, and Industry. 

It's going to be a heavy trash bin this week.
___________

To lighten things up, the reason I'm tossing things (including the set of all that is treasured and worthy) is that I got up the energy to do some deep cleaning and organizing.  And you can't do that without tossing things.  Not really.

I have two big boxes for Goodwill.  I threw away other things that didn't twang my guilt strings. 

And I did this:

This is a completly cleaned and organized cupboard.  There was also much other kitchening, but it is not complete and you will therefore see no photos. 

This has room for other things.  There are blanks spaces.  Look at them.

Oh, and this isn't complete . . .

 . . . but it had been bugging the b'geebers out of me, so you can see it, too. 

Some of the things on it will be gone tonight.  It had been covered with assorted things, assorted things with a heavy dust and grime buildup, in the case of the things on the bottom shelves . . . and the very top shelf.  Now you can see horizontal wood.

That didn't sound right.  Let's try again.  You can see usable work space.  Better.

The tubs don't go there, but as I said, the organizing is not complete, yet.  But it's clean and there's space and I threw out a lot of other things, and donated a lot more.  I'm letting that balance out my callous dismissal of Treasured Dreams. 

Good Weekend

Had a good weekend.  More later.

Glee

It's been awhile, hasn't it. A couple of weeks back, I counted up the photos I had sorted and labeled that weekend, both in the computer and in hand. That is, they were the same photos. They had been previously scanned, and I labeled and sorted the photos while also labeling and sorting the scans in my computer.

There were 454 of them. It had been a three day weekend on one hand, but on the other, I hadn't worked continuously. That finished all of the photos that had been scanned over Christmas break.

At that point, the old scanning sleeve was scratched enough that the scanner was scanning the scratches more than the pictures, so I had to stop. I haven't been able to pry replacement sleeves out of either the manufacturer or Kodak. Their online customer service sucks.

I tried buying a new scanner, but can't find a simple one, like the old one at any local store. I tried online and found a larger version of the little scanner I was using. I just sent it back. The note I made on Facebook about it reads:

Bought a new scanner. Was all excited. Had hundreds of photos queued up to be scanned. Sucker doesn't work. Sending back. Repacking photos. Damn.

There is a picture. The problem with the scanner was that it wouldn't pull the photos through. So my Dear Son tried pushing them through, to see if that would work.

At least if they ever get the rollers to work, the scan part works fine.

I still have no scanner, so I've been pre-sorting and sometimes labeling more photos. There are still boxes and boxes in the garage.

The good news is that I've discovered that the best way to store the pictures is in index card archive boxes. The bad news is that I now have a box full of unscanned photos and no scanner. And for most of it, what I really need is just a new sleeve.

But that's not what I came here to say. I came to share the glee of finding 9 packets of pictures that could be thrown away with only the mildest of guilt. Wheee. They were Gerry's photos.

Gerry was my Mom's second husband. The photos didn't get thrown away automatically just because they were his. They got tossed because he would take a lot of pictures of, say, the view from someplace he had visited or from the property where he would build his house. But it wouldn't be labeled, so it would just be a bunch of overexposed trees, with a few fronts of trucks thrown in.

No people + no labels usually gets chucked no matter who took them. Oh, there was also a dead deer on a mule and what looked like damaged furniture. I'm guessing the first was from a hunting trip and the second was evidence for a claim against a moving company. Not much use for posterity, especially with no smiling hunters in any shot.

The pictures of fish all have smiling fishermen holding them. The ones with Gerry in them are being kept for now. I may toss them later, but I won't be able to toss them with guilt-free glee. And that's what I experienced last night, folks. Nearly guilt-free glee.

Planning Ahead

I haven't really gotten back into the swing of blogging since my vacation.  This is something that I made while vacating.  It was done with Comic Life, an ipod ap.