Rick's b.log - 2023/06/04
It is the 19th of May 2024 You are 3.136.97.64, pleased to meet you!

So. Many. Towels.

There are two bin bags full of towels in the cow barn. They're good towels, but, you know, there's a stack of washed good towels on the rocking chair...

There are also two bags full of bits of fabric. Nothing was worth keeping as it was all very feminine. I think half a Laura Ashley shop was lying around.

This is what I started with, sort of like how much of the room was.

What it was this morning.

And here's the same shot afterwards. I had to scrub the floor. Dampness and cardboard, not a great mix.

What it was this evening.

I still have to tidy the chest of drawers. It looks as if the upper wide drawer (middle row) is full of candles. WTactualF?
But, then, the bookshelves opposite need to be sorted out, so I'll probably do both at the same time (which is likely to be a case of "box it, cow barn".
I'll have to move the candalabra and the wind chimes hanging from it. They weren't in the way before, but they're right in the way now.
You can (just) see my coat hanging on the door. I found a door mounted hook, so I drilled two holes in the door to fit the thing.

Since I have numerous coats, plus umbrella and so on, I am getting a coat stand from Amazon. I'm having it sent to the supermarket for collection because there's no way it'll fit in the letterbox.
Amazon has an augmented reality feature where you can see what the thing looks like in your own home. It can get the scaling comically wrong. It is 182cm in height, so a little taller than me.
As you can see from the screenshot, it's a monster over two metres. The picture looks naff because the app I'm using (ZomboDroid (I think) Image Resizer) doesn't understand the concept of anti-aliasing. It's weird seeing an app in 2023 failing at what ChangeFSI breezed thirty years ago in 1993.

I also found a bag full of used McDo cups, back when they used to do decent tea and didn't stress over supplying milk with the tea. That cup on the right is dated 25th February 2013. I can only guess that mom was planning to recycle these as plant pots or something?

Cups, but not a printer service.

I guess, on the good side, doing this mostly kept me out of the sun. It's been really rather hot, it nearly got to 27°C today, with humidity in the upper 30s (dry).
At least, I can look at the weeds and know that I had an excuse for not doing something about it. ☺

There are still three primary things to do now.

• The back left, which I think (hope!) is mostly a pile of empty boxes. Shouldn't be too hard to put some in the cow shed and flatten others to go into the recycling bag.
• The table by the window. It's a pile, but it's mostly my stuff, lots of bank statements and such.
• And, finally, rearrange the drawers and book shelves to better reflect, well, me. Looking over, I can see "Taste of Morocco", "The English Medieval House", and... "Plate Tectonics"! Okay, I might keep that last one, unless it's full of maths which I rather suspect it will be.

Another task, with no time restriction, is to take down some of mom's stuff from the walls and put up some of my own. I mean, look at this...

Some of the things on the wall.

A pilgrimage to Jerusalem (yes, it's real), a page of a bible written in Syriac (left, no it's not Arabic) and Latin (right). And a cross stitch with an alphabet. Mom called them "samplers", but I never understood ruining a perfectly good cross stitch by sticking a bunch of letters below it. And as a nerd, please, the kerning... <shudder>

Your comments:

J.G.Harston, 4th June 2023, 23:13

You have my sympathy. I've been clearing my Mum's house. Boxes and boxes and boxes of towels, bedding, curtains, sheets. See pics.mdfs.net/2023/03/230303.htm for a sample.

Rob, 5th June 2023, 00:46

Ah, I've got it all to come. I was up at Mum's earlier in the week. The hospital diagnosed cancer last year, said she'd be lucky to last until Christmas, but she's still with us, albeit frail. She knows she's not got long, and had me sorting out the garage. It's mostly still full of "junk" - the stuff my dad had been buying at car boot sales that wasn't good enough to make it into the house (which is itself still crammed to the rafters, six years after he passed: jod.org.uk)     Anyway, I've now got a car full of stuff that is too good to throw away, and so needs me go through, deciding if it's worth selling or donating to the charity shop.     I also found my old record deck; seems it's actually a decent make, with good condition ones on ebay being offered in the several-hundred-pounds range. This one, slightly rusty, on a dodgy DIY plywood base with crap cables, I suspect isn't worth anywhere near that much. But, it will probably will work better than the same-old chinese-plastic mechanisms you spot being used in /everything/ these days so I'll probably clean it up and use it, if I can find a space to put it. (I'm pretty certain I picked it up at a jumble sale in the 1970s, chosen because it was the same make as my mum's new and very expensive one! I think this one is 1960s.)    There's also lots of crockery. Those I've looked up are at least £5 an item on ebay, if I can be bothered selling it. I'm resisting just dumping everything in the storage unit, as I'll never get around to dealing with them (based on the many, many, boxes of books and magazines I already removed from the garage a few years back and are still in there waiting me dealing with them.)    I'll say this for dad, he mostly picked up stuff that had some value. This makes it hard to simply chuck it away... If only he'd been able to sell more of it. Whilst he loved using the computer for word processing and email, he never really got the hang of selling things online.

Gavin Wraith, 5th June 2023, 11:17

We have some neighbours whom we have known for over fifty years. Lovely people, but they cannot throw anything away. Their house is so stuffed with junk that they bought a caravan, and that was soon stuffed with junk too. If I ever complain about the state of our house my wife will contrive to get me to visit them, and I realize that we are in a better place as we are.  There is a bag lady in Lewes, who once got me to lug some of her stuff, bags of books. She said that if she left them at home her neighbours would try to steal them. We all have our obsessions, as we are frightened by emptiness.

C Ferris, 6th June 2023, 10:44

I can see Rick at a Car Boot sale -with a mountain of towels for sale :-)