Moving & Hoarding - AGAIN

So, I am preparing to move again; yes, its been a year already.  In an effort to minimize the hassles of moving, I am yet again disposing of things I don't want to move - or make my friends move this time!! 

Anyway, I have unconsciously hoarded again -

Clothes . . . I have clothes in 10 different sizes but can only wear one size.

Newspaper for starting fires in the fireplace.  I have tons but only used the fireplace about 10 times. 

Plastic storage totes, though in fairness, most of them came from unpacking other things I got rid of.

Picture frames - the big ones 11 x 17 with no pictures to fit them.

I honestly think I should just avoid thrift stores completely.  Or I could quit moving & live with denial.

Lost my _ key today

Okay, my laptop is old & not getting any younger.  Today I lost my _ key.  I'm trying to write _-mas letters at top speed and can't believe how often I use my _ key . . . things are e_citing, e_tra money, e_tra days off, etc.   It makes me wonder what else I have lost this year beyond my brothers.

I definitely lost time, days go by & I wonder where they went - its Friday, I think its Tuesday; look at a clock thinking its late morning & its really 3:00 and on and on.

I'm so busy anticipating future commitments & plans that I have lost my Now as well.  I used to do things right when I think of them because I forget if I don't do them "Now"; so I forgot the items I wanted to search for on Craigslist; the Zyrtec coupon I was going to use; to pay my internet bill (almost lost that one); to replace the dodad that makes the horn work in my van.  You get the picture.

So I have to fi_ the _-key before my mind e_plodes!

MERRY ___-MAS & A HAPPY NE___ YEAR -

oh, shoot - there goes another one . . .

Just watching Mike & Molly and wanted to share a great line from it:

Everyone has a cross to bear, mine is made of lead & covered in fire ants.

Seemed to apply.

Melancholy

So I haven't written in a while and some of my friends are bugging me to get back at it . . . ironically I'm also bugging the blogger who originally got me started to get back to it as well.  

The truth of it is I am still in a funk from recent events & I can't seem to find my sense of the absurd.  I get some really good jokes in the email; occasionally a kid does something funny but I just can't see the Golden Glow in all the depressing fog surrounding me.   I keep telling myself just hang in until next year; 7 more weeks and I'll turn a corner.  

Maybe if I finish unpacking . . . no really there are still boxes in the living room!

Or go back to some of those old joys I can recapture the Glow . . . then it hit me.  That's exactly what I need.  I need to do puzzles again.

When I was a teenager and faced with a problem, I would do a puzzle with my Mom and we would work and talk - my problem would slip out and she would help me fix it.  She said it helped me to organize my mind, feel like I completed something and to see the big picture.

So I have been doing puzzles all over the place & now instead of a hoarder, I am a puzzler!!  I have 2 puzzles going at home.  I've been doing all kinds of puzzles on the internet to the tune of hours at a time & I've spent a lot of time in the past month or so doing jigsaw puzzles with kids and passing along my mother's wisdom.  

Its like someone threw me a rope & I just had to put it together before I could pull myself up.  Uh oh, here come the tears again . . . but they are of relief not so much sadness.

I vow to once again haunt the thrift stores & garage sales and keep puzzling my way to the top again.

Thank you to my friends for their patience, support and maintaining the distance I need to grieve in private.   Don't worry, I'll work on some punny puzzle jokes for next time.

In Honor of my Other Brother

And so it has come to pass, my older brother, David (here with his 2 kids Joshua & Rebekah), passed just 2 days after Red and I am slogging through the grief and occasionally falling on my face from the weight of it all until the jokes started . . . as follows:

I am talking on the phone to my niece and my Doberman runs past me with a dead mouse in her mouth - right into the house, right up on my bed; I'm screaming and running from her and she is chasing me;

Followed by the lawn mower which ran so well for the past month, won't run at all & the new trimmers I just bought keep getting stuck;

then, a bunch of frogs take up residence on my screened in porch & the Dobie spends all night barking at them;

and, last night, a chamleon keeps me up most of the night running across the wall above my head causing my Dobie (80 lbs) to dance on me repeatedly.

OK guys, quit it  . . . and yes, I can still hear you laughing . . .

Such Sadness

Since February 2011, I have watched (from a distance) my brother deteriorate from multiple cancers and today he left this world for another one.  My other brother is also deteriorating from a spinal injury and will soon join his brother.  I am to be the oldest of the children after 48 years of being third from the top and I am so sad.  For my first 5 years, my 2 brothers raised me, protected me and provided for me and my youngest sister.  They were my link to memories of my mother who walked away in my fifth year and never returned.  For the next 6 years they tormented and harassed me, but always with the jokes.  We would sit around the kitchen table, tell jokes & one liners and laugh until we cried.  My Dad was the ringleader of this band of merry men.   When I was 11, my brothers left for the Army and we rarely saw each other but when we did, we would laugh like maniacs as if we were never parted. 

The party has moved to heaven now and the 3 boys (Dad included) are probably going to torment & harass me from a far until I join them.  I can picture you Red leaning down from the top bunk and pretending to be the windshield wipers on my glasses while I cry.  Miss you bro.

Justifying my Plastic Container Collection

So I've moved and begun the unpacking process.  I've admitted my hoarding affliction and am prepared to overcome it.  Really wish I had faced it before I lugged all the extra junk to the new house . . . but better late than never.

Anyway, I'm unpacking and I open 3 green garbage bags and 1 huge tub of plastic food storage containers and I realize I need therapy.  Did I never throw out an empty butter tub (of any size), Chinese soup containers (those lids are totally leak proof) or the large yogurt containers (about a 100 of these).  The following thoughts have formed:

1.  Who was cooking all this food that had to be stored? Ahh . . . not me.

2.  How much food was I planning on saving at any one time?  Frig is only so big.

3.  They are not see thru so how many would I have to open to find the food I was actually looking for?  Honestly, most of them.

4.  I don't go anywhere, so I don't take food with me. 

5.  I have teeny tiny tupperware . . . was I really saving a tablespoon of something?

So you see its become some sort compulsion, but I can honestly say its all unconscious.  I don't shop products wondering what would fit in it after the original item was gone.  I don't hit thrift stores for rubbermaid or tupperware containers.  I always, and this is a compulsion, return containers to original owners if I take food home from their house.    I can always find a justification for collecting a specific container too, which deeply bothers me.   Chinese soup containers are tall, skinny and I'm not kidding, leak proof.  I don't eat soup so why am I saving them.  Square, rectangle ones are stackable in the frig; butter tubs hold 1-2 servings of whatever, and on and on it goes. 

So they are all going to the recycling guy . . . well, most of them, or some of them, maybe a few of them; ok 10 of them.  And don't get me started on my thousands of buttons in 5 different cookie tins or my entire 3 shelf cupboard of glass jars for canning, in all kinds of sizes.

Hey, one affliction at a time.