Who goes there? Please leave comments so (An Aries Knows)!
Apparently one of mine is unpacking boxes, especially if I have to dust, wash, or otherwise clean what I’ve unpacked. So I’ve had to bargain with myself. If I get X unpacked (X being kitchen boxes or clothes or bathroom stuff or THE NEVER-ENDING OFFICE CRAP), I can unpack more books, the only things I really want to unpack.
So far, it’s working, and the shelves are finally beginning to fill up.
(Penny supervises.)
Some things can be fun to unpack. Years ago, Tim and I officed together in a room at The Compound. After wireless came along and he could more easily be online in his apartment, I turned it back into a guest room and moved into my little office off the kitchen. Most of the crap/stuff/whatever I had on shelves around me was put into bins in the garage with crap/stuff/whatever that had been packed from various workplaces, because I had significantly less desk and shelf space and wanted less clutter.
I’m finally almost through organizing my office, and the last thing to do was open those bins and start purging. Dear lord, so many floppy disks. If you’re a teenager today, do you even know what a floppy disk is? Vinyl records have become cool to have again. Will floppys ever make a comeback?
But I digress. Here are some of the fun things I found (along with more pens and pencils and endless tablets and Post-Its and notepads of many shapes and sizes).
Three little bottles, all from my friend James. Two contain bits of dirt or little rocks, probably from a certain redwood forest that holds great meaning for us. And the other I wasn’t sure about so I opened it, and for crying out loud, I’d just cleaned my keyboard the day before and now it’s been dusted by glitter. Fiendish James.
In one of the places where I did contract work back in the late 1990s, a coworker brought back voodoo dolls from New Orleans for several of us. I ended up with two who do that voodoo that two do so well.
Our friends Christine and John gave us this little bud vase many, many years ago. It’s endured some wear and tear, but it’s still a great holder for a bud I cut from a rose bush that’s growing here on the property-that-still-has-no-name.
I almost never got this open. I think it was originally a box a scented candle came in, but I had no idea what might be stored inside it. Voila! The daffiest of things.
Bad Daffy and Good Daffy. One of Good Daffy’s wings is broken, but that can be fixed on some Craft Night.
Hmmm, Debby, apparently I thought we might go back to bingo someday and I was prepared! Well, prepared if I wanted to search for a random bin in an overpacked garage to find these.
My trusty old Zippo. I think I received this as a gift when I was a college freshman or sophomore. When I was an undergraduate, students (and professors) could and did smoke in class. Crazy!
A small soapstone ram box containing the ring of a friend who’s no longer with us, a tiny piece of rose quartz, and a little pewter stone that says “create.” A good reminder.
Everyone should keep a jar full of rainbows.
Random assortment of candle holders and a soapstone dish I used for burning incense cones.
Also very random: faded wrist bands from two of Tim’s three hospitalizations. Longtime readers will remember that I said I was keeping these to auction off to his stalkers to help pay his medical bills. 😉
A little leather pouch that contains a bottle with a blend I made of essential oils. I don’t remember which recipe this is, but it still smells wonderful. A bracelet from Jim. I think this was a Jim/Steve C/Tim visit and he bought all of us one of these in Galveston. And a little stone my mother gave me as a reminder of my healing hands.
This tray that sits inside a desk drawer still has random little notes from a job I have not had since 1996. But who cares because HOLY ANTONIO BANDERAS. This almost makes me want to unpack the ten zillion boxes still stacked in the back room of the apartment-that-also-has-no-name. Almost.
Tom and I finally had an hour to watch the first episode of the most recent season of “Downton Abbey.” Afterward, I felt inspired to go old-school and try to catch up with my personal correspondence in front of the fire. With pens. Envelopes. Stamps. Snoring dogs.
I’m trying to organize my office. I’ve had so much office-type crap stuck in so many places over the years that trying to pull it together and arrange it (and purge much of it) is daunting. I have learned:
I have too many red pens. These are just a few of them.
When a pen doesn’t write or a mechanical pencil is broken, throw it away immediately. Or you’ll end up with a wastebasket that looks like mine.
I’m obsessed with wooden pencils. I found two more boxes of them after I took this photo.
When you get free calendars, don’t stick them somewhere until you need them, because eleven years later…
Just a few shots of moving day. This is before the movers came, and now the room the dogs are in–the office/craft room–is piled high with boxes. I have a LOT to do. But the dogs are content, and that’s what matters.
First visit and exploration.
Lots for Guinness and Margot to sniff.
Pollock comes over to play with Anime.
Pixie and Penny are not so sure about this and wait for Tim to come back.
Pollock wants to play outside.
Anime running with the big dogs!
Watch out Guinness, there’s a Pixie gaining on you.
Margot has no time for shenanigans.
We do have an actual move date near week’s end; the frantic last-minute stuff has begun. But sometimes you just have to leapfrog the process and unpack a few of the things that make a place feel like home…
(Plus we needed the boxes for more…books.)
The former owner had cabinets of pecan custom made for his dining room–the room that will be our living room.
They weren’t built in, but one day while we were at the house, he asked if we wanted them. He wasn’t selling them, he was just willing to leave them, we figured probably because they were too heavy to move! I’d had other plans for that wall, but hey, it’s good furniture so we said yes, he could leave them there.
When the floor guys came, they helped Tom move the cabinets out of there, plus he took the mirror down, and that’s when we discovered that when the room was repainted at some point, they just painted around everything. They really are that heavy!
But Tom took care of that. Current appearance:
Since the middle cabinet is bonus storage space I didn’t expect to have, we gathered up all the games and puzzles from all the places they were tucked away at The Compound. Look, Lindsey, ORGANIZATION!
Bonus and unrelated shot for my family: How familiar do these look?
The not-so-slow evolution of the master bedroom.
One day Tom spent more hours at the new house than I expected considering what he’d told me he’d be doing there. In fact, he was doing a home improvement project I didn’t know about.
This is an angle showing the master bedroom right after the seller moved out.
Tom painted it very close to the same blue that’s in our current Compound bedroom as a Christmas surprise. And thanks to our hardworking flooring guys, no more carpet!
Janet, if you’re seeing this, you might remember this switch plate you gave us one year. It was on the mud porch at The Compound. There aren’t many light switches like this in the new house, so Tom put it in the bedroom where the contrast against the blue wall shows it off. =)
For simplicity’s sake, let’s stick with the same room. Remember this photo from a few days ago? Yes, this was some of the carpet being pulled up.
And holy crap, we time traveled to the Sixties!
A work in progress…
There may be carpet to be pulled up and new flooring to be installed, walls to be touched up or painted, an entire house to be cleaned top to bottom, and endless other jobs to be done before moving in, but the first thing Tom and I did in the new house after the seller was out was have a little fire in the fireplace. Who cares if it’s Houston and too warm this December for a fire? We have our priorities. =)
