From the Editor

Editing of a different kind

Wed, 08/16/2017 - 8:00am

Instead of the usual editing of copy on Tuesday, I did some editing of a different kind – a bit of home downsizing.

Taking advantage of our week off together, my wife and I tackled our storage room and three closets.

After putting together two five-shelf, metal shelving units to hold the items in our storage room, I joined my wife in cleaning out our storage room first — some of our stuff, my daughter's family stuff, and son's stuff.  Got rid of some of those souvenir plastic cups, old pillow cases (we've still got more than we'll ever need) and other stuff that, for the life of me, I can't remember what else went. But it was enough to fill up three large garbage bags.

Then there were the items that went to the pick pile at the dump — one large and one small George Foreman grill, some kind of electric gizmo which heats scented wax, a coffee grinder (last used in 1999, I think), a kitchen utensil holder, a Magic Bullet and all the attachments, and a few more items that filled the back seat of our Ford Explorer — twice.

The two shelving units managed to hold all of our cleaning items, candles, pots and pans, a bread maker and much more. We even found room to store items “found” in the closets.

We had purchased a few storage bins beforehand to reorganize our granddaughters' American Girl doll items — passed down from her mother and a few more items garnered in the past few years. Two large bins for that stuff. I predict in five years, those items will be sold at a yard sale when the girls move on to more important things like cell phones and boys.

The day ended with us picking through our son's stuff. He's been working in Nebraska since October of 2013 and during his visits home, he hasn't had (or taken) the time to do his own "weeding" so we did it for him. His many gaming magazines, comic books, a few reading books, old phones, computer manuals, and arm loads of other stuff were tossed, recycled and picked at the dump.

So, until the next downsizing venture — oh, yeah, there’s still stuff that needs to go, such as books, toys, Christmas items, board games, sentimental items, and more — at least we have some more storage area available.

Good grief!