Cleaning is a lot like archaeology...
Feb. 27th, 2006 06:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rjlona... because it can be surprising what you dig up.
My folks and I have slowly been cleaning out our basement. This is noteworthy because I can't remember us *ever* cleaning out the basement. It's scary down there! Some of the cobwebs remind me of the opening of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (hopefully without the enormous tarantulas!). When I first mentioned this endeavor to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
flinx, he offered to help, but I didn't want to subject him to it (plus I'm not sure he's had any booster shots lately). So far we've gotten rid of about 30 large bags of trash. Given that we all suffer from packratitis, this is quite a feat. We tend to work in short bursts because none of us can stand the stirred-up dust for long.
There are some drawbacks and some benefits to this enterprise (some of which are the same). Drawbacks include getting really, really grimy, and having to make the decision to pitch stuff. Sometimes the pitching is easy, especially with the really, really grimy stuff. But sometimes it's hard (packratitis and all that). On the benefit side, I'm working on conquering my packratitis by throwing out lots of stuff I know I can now part with: tests and papers from classes I'll never need to reference again (bio of disease, intro to short story), homework from high school, copies of the high school newspaper I edited, stuff like that. I also have found some real treasures: all of my yearbooks, the programs from all the plays I worked on, the vidoetapes of most of those plays, books I'd forgotten I owned, some of my favorite childhood toys that are still nice enough to be passed on to current children that I know, pictures of me from when I dyed my hair magenta with Manic Panic.
We still have quite a lot of work ahead of us. While the floor in the main room is becoming visible, there are still 2 more rooms, plus the area around dad's old workbench and the pit of despair that is a defunct bathroom (unused for at least 10 years), and the storage space under the stairs. Strangely, sometimes I actually look forward to this task, mainly because there are items that I'm trying to find.
My folks and I have slowly been cleaning out our basement. This is noteworthy because I can't remember us *ever* cleaning out the basement. It's scary down there! Some of the cobwebs remind me of the opening of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (hopefully without the enormous tarantulas!). When I first mentioned this endeavor to
flinx, he offered to help, but I didn't want to subject him to it (plus I'm not sure he's had any booster shots lately). So far we've gotten rid of about 30 large bags of trash. Given that we all suffer from packratitis, this is quite a feat. We tend to work in short bursts because none of us can stand the stirred-up dust for long.There are some drawbacks and some benefits to this enterprise (some of which are the same). Drawbacks include getting really, really grimy, and having to make the decision to pitch stuff. Sometimes the pitching is easy, especially with the really, really grimy stuff. But sometimes it's hard (packratitis and all that). On the benefit side, I'm working on conquering my packratitis by throwing out lots of stuff I know I can now part with: tests and papers from classes I'll never need to reference again (bio of disease, intro to short story), homework from high school, copies of the high school newspaper I edited, stuff like that. I also have found some real treasures: all of my yearbooks, the programs from all the plays I worked on, the vidoetapes of most of those plays, books I'd forgotten I owned, some of my favorite childhood toys that are still nice enough to be passed on to current children that I know, pictures of me from when I dyed my hair magenta with Manic Panic.
We still have quite a lot of work ahead of us. While the floor in the main room is becoming visible, there are still 2 more rooms, plus the area around dad's old workbench and the pit of despair that is a defunct bathroom (unused for at least 10 years), and the storage space under the stairs. Strangely, sometimes I actually look forward to this task, mainly because there are items that I'm trying to find.
