Sunday, March 27, 2011

our dirty BIG secret

I have a couple secrets to share with you. It's all probably TMI and I will probably alienate a lot of you out there....but there could be someone out there in blogland who will find comfort that they are not alone....

We'll start with my problem with procrastination. Dodi, on January 23rd mentions in her blog that she finally put away Christmas. I read it, I laughed, I commented....but shamefully I had my stack of various nativities on the side table waiting for me to pack up.

Well come March they were still there. Last week, I FINALLY packed them up. If you look closely you can see the clovers on the newspaper ads....that would be ads for St. Patrick's day. How sad is that? Wrapping Christmas up with St. Patrick's day advertisements......


All wrapped and ready to go into...what is our next dirty secret.....our basement. Have you ever seen the show Hoarders? I love that show. I'm horrified by that show. I AM that show. At least my basement is. Let's start with over 20 years ago when my dad died. I packed away some of his books. We both shared a love of reading and a love of collecting books. The problem was, I never opened those boxes again. Part of it was that it was too painful, partly who knows why. We've been carting these books with us over seven moves (Jason, in this case is a freakin' saint!). We moved into this house about six years ago and have have since remodeled the first two floors. The problem is that I've just been throwing stuff in the basement to-deal-with-later as each room got completed that combined with the boxes and boxes of books have given us THIS:






My project for the next couple of months is to go through EVERYTHING and throw out at least....gasp - half, okay maybe a third, mostly a fourth of the junk down there and find a home for whatever we keep. I started today, I cleaned out six boxes and have three boxes in a pile to donate to Good Will and the library.

And, I found these gems....
Jason threatened to slap me when I began to disparage his trekkiness.
We also found some of my high school report cards...which Jason decided to scan and save on his computer --why? I wanted to toss them....seriously a D in Algebra, like I want my kids to see that? I definitely don't want them to see the 30 absences from the same class (a correlation?)
We also found my high school literary publication where I had a poem published....Jason read it and laughed and laughed...His comment was, 'geeze, trace, was part two how you slit your wrists, can you get more depressing? Maybe we should send this to the Zoloft company and they can use it in an ad" I won't include the poem here...thankfully I've grown out of that teen-girl-life-is-horrible-angst.

This project may be funner then I thought it would be. Tomorrow, more boxes. I wonder what I'll find.

10 comments:

Martha said...

Hoarders won't want you on their show...I see no dead bodies OR animal excrement. See, not so bad, right? Seriously, it's a process...you are ready my dear friend, I know you are!!!

Amanda said...

I just realized I still have a Santa-holding-a-Nativity-scene out on my piano, along with a gingerbread man music box and Choreboy's and my stockings.

Oops.

kathy eason said...

ok. this might be my favorite blog of yours so far. mostly because if you look right over my head (c'mon you can't see nashua from colorado??) you will see a string of Christmas ornaments still hanging on the window. who said March 27th could come so quickly anyway? ~kathy

Ann Hill said...

Tracy, I love u more and more, the International Santa collection only made it to the crawl space last week ! the basement got cleared to the point that sleep overs are now confined to the spare room, and I have 2 whole garbage bags from my closet ready for goodwill ; of course i had to go to Cherry creek for some replenishment therapy !

Dodi said...

See, we're not so strange after all. Turns out we're just "overly festive".

I think our souls have been together during several lifetimes now - I can think of no other way to explain our matching basements.

Bridgett said...

I'm doing this same project, and I fear hoarders (the show) as well. It keeps me from becoming one! But you are better than I am because you posted pictures! I have far too much shame about the basement to do so...

tracey.becker1@gmail.com said...

I still have a Christmas wreath on my front porch. It's fake and I intend on throwing it away and never decorating outside the house, ever,ever again.

Colleen O said...

it's all good when you go through and let things go - it's bad when you decide that for some ridiculous reason you need to keep that ________ and put it back. Well, that's what keeps me re-visiting the basement.

Happy purging!

Rock Chef said...

We are terrible hoarders - if we had a spare space that big it would be stuffed with junk too!

Nina said...

hehehe love this post! maybe someday I'll have the courage to post a pic of my garage. maybe. And love that last pic of the Cpt. Kirk TV guide! he's dreamy :)