(no subject)

I had a voicemail message late last week from my landlords, letting me know that Painter Guy was going to be coming back on Monday to do some work on the interior of the new windows, and to check out interior windowframes in general for any that need touch-up, and I was listening thinking OK, crap, I really need to clean up around here, I guess, and then -- I heard the dreaded words, "Oh, and he's going to need to look at the basement windows, too, so he'll need to be able to get at them, if you could just, uh, clear a path."

See, my landlords have been in my basement, and so they know that it is essentially a dumping ground for fifteen-plus years' worth of unsorted, disorganized, dusty, cobweb-covered crap. So I was grateful for the warning, but damn it all.

There's no help for it, though, so this morning after an extra-strong pot of coffee, I ventured down there, took stock of the situation, and -- well. This is more or less what I was confronting. (The windows that need to be accessed are on the left-hand wall, just above the top edge of the picture.) Actually, at the time I snapped this, I'd cleared off the top layer; hard as it is to believe, and as embarrassing as it is to confess, it was even *worse* before I started.

In the course of several hours of sweated and filthy labor, I discovered an amazing amount of crap that I can't believe I haven't disposed of long before this, including:

--a gigantic removable leg-brace from when I had my knee surgery back in '88;
--a bunch of photographic chemicals from when I was doing darkroom work back in the late '80s;
--some books on counseling psychology that one of my profs loaned me when I was back in grad school and I never returned (shame, I tell you!);
--my grandmother's Electrolux vacuum cleaner, circa WWII, which by heft appears to be made out of pig iron;
--an Apple monitor from the early days of home computing, whose beige plastic casing has literally turned amber-yellow with age;
--many many canning jars, from back when I was actually deranged enough to do home canning;
--a broken-down NordicTrak, unused since the mid-90s;
--a warped and splintery wooden birdfeeder, extensively gnawed by squirrels;
--a whole platoon of grow-lights, from back in the days when I used to garden and would start dozens of seedlings indoors every March;
--and so much, much more.

I feel utterly unequal to the task of sorting through all this crap, but at least I've at least cleared a path to the accursed windows. And I've taken a first tentative step on Rational Means of Disposal by setting up a system to send myself reminder e-mails every Thursday night to take another few chunks out to the trash.

And kids? Don't let this happen to you. Travel light, cull often, learn from my hideous example.

Further updates of scant interest

Well, I have achieved a partial triumph in the Basement of Disaster; a path has at least been cleared to to the windows, and the larger and grosser cobwebs have been vacuumed away. Sufficient unto the day, etc. etc.

After these accomplishments, and a long shower, I went over to my old friend J's house to help her son H with his college applications. H is the high school senior I was shamefacedly perving over in an entry a while back, the tall amazingly good-looking kid with the perfect RayK hair and the alpha brain. Despite his formidable abilities in calculus, theoretical physics, etc., he is something of a klutz in daily life, and had recently had a bike accident that left him with both arms in casts, hence unable to type. So I hauled my laptop over and spent a while deciphering his tiny angular scientist-geek handwriting and typing up some of his application essays and, for good measure, a school paper on The Crucible. H's essays are hilarious, because he has the scientist's mindset of "State the problem, describe the procedure, state the solution, bing bang done" and he has no patience whatsoever for the art of essay writing, which I (and various of his teachers) have explained to him is all about "Ease in artfully, foreshadow what you're going to tell them, then tell it to them, using lots of examples and metaphors and illustrative language, and then gently draw together what you've just told them." He finds this pointlessly repetitive and inane, and his impatience shows through here and there in his prose. *g* However, he has an excellent command of language, and is almost as fond of semicolons as I (and always uses them correctly), so I forgive him much, and find his papers a hoot to type. I like to imagine him fifteen years from now as the shining young star of some physics department somewhere, still falling off his bike and walking grouchily out of longwinded departmental meetings, trailed about by an adoring gaggle of grad students, and departmental secretaries who would just *love* to do his typing for him. *g*